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HIGH LIGHTS OF THE 
FRENCH REVOLUTION 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE 
FRENCH REVOLUTION 



BY 
HILAIRE BELLOC 

AuTHOa OF "ROBKSPIEREE," "MaKIE 

Antoinette," etc. 



WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS 
FROM PAINTINGS AND PRINTS 




NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 

1915 



^J^"' 

y-^^ 



Copyright, 1914, 1915, by 
The Century Co, 

Published, October, 1915 



QGT 22 1915 



^CI.A414203 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Pabt One 

PAGE 

The Royal Seance 3 

Part Two 

Introduction . . . • 55 

The Flight to Varennes 61 

Part Three 

Introduction 113 

The Storming of the Tuileeier 115 

Part Four 

Introduction 161 

Under the Mill of Valmy 163 

Part Five 

Introduction 203 

The Death of Louis XVI 205 

Part Six 

Introduction 239 

Lafayette and the Fall of the French Monarchy . . . 241 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

The Young Koyalist Frontispiece 

PAGE 

Louis XVI 4 

Louis-Stanislas-Xavier de Bourbon, Comte de Provence, after- 
ward Louis XVIII 9 

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand 15 

Jean-Sylvain Bailly, President of the Commons in 1789 ... 22 

The Commons taking the oath in the Tennis-Court at Versailles 28 

Jacques Necker, Rector-General of Finances 33 

The meeting of the National Assembly at Versailles, June, 1789 40 
Emmanuel-Joseph Siey&s, Deputy from Paris to the Mational 

Assembly 45 

Gabriel Honors Riquetti, Comte De Mirabeau 51 

Allegory of the oath-taking in the Tennis-Court at Versailles . 58 

"Vive le Roi ! Vive la Nation ! " 64 

The National Assembly Petrified 69 

The National Assembly Revivified 69 

Madame Elisabeth 76 

The end of the flight of the Royal Family at Varennes ... 81 

Tlie Royal Family at Varennes, June 22, 1791 88 

Drouet, the Postmaster at Varennes 93 

The return to Paris 100 

The arrival of the Royal Family in Paris, June 25, 1791 . . . 105 
Enrolling volunteers in Paris on the Pont Neuf, before the statue 

of Henry IV 118 

The Storming of the Tuileries 121 

The assault of the Tuileries 128 

A soldier of the National Guard 131 

Grenadier of the Infantry of Ligne 131 

Marie- Antoinette and her children 136 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Louis XVI — The Forge in the Palace at Versailles 141 

The Tuileries and its Garden in 1757 148 

The struggle in the Halls of the Tuileries, August 10, 1792 . . 153 
Ceremonial Costume of the Clergy, the Nobility and the Commons 160 

Uniforms of the Army of French Emigrants 105 

Goethe, who was with the German Army at Valmy . . . .171 
Marshal Frangois-Christophe Keller mann, Duke of Valmy . .178 

A Republican General .... 184 

A Colonel of Infantry 184 

Under the Mill at Valmy 189 

General Charles-Frangois Dumouriez — In Command of the 

French at Valmy 195 

Republican soldiers in the Revolution 202 

Lamoignon de INIalesherbes, Counsel for the King at his Trial . 207 
Proclamation of the Provisional Executive Council . . . .214 

The last victims of the Terror 220 

King Louis taking leave of his family in the tower of the Temple 223 

A Mass Under the Terror 227 

The death of King Louis XVI, January 21, 1793 233 

Armand GastoU; Cardinal de Rohan 252 

Caricature of a Royalist 257 

Caricature of a Patriot 257 

Cartoon of the Three Orders [The Clergy, Nobility and the Com- 
mons] in the National Assembly Forging the New Constitu- 
tion 204 

A Popular Print at the time of tlie Revolution 209 

Maximilien Robespierre 270 

Georges Jacques Dan ton 281 

Marie Jean Paul Roch Yves Gilbert Motier, Marquis de Lafa- 
yette 297 



PART ONE 

THE ROYAL SEANCE 




LOUIS XVI 

From a photograph by Braiin, Clement & Co., New York, of the painting by 

Antoiue-Francois Callet, in Museum of Versailles 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE 
FRENCH REVOLUTION 

PART ONE 

THE ROYAL SEANCE 

UPON the crest of the steep and thickly 
wooded hills that rise from the left bank of 
the Seine below Paris, you may find a village the 
old stones of which, and something spacious in its 
whole arrangement, are consonant with its name. 
It is called "Marly of the King." 

There the great trees, the balustrade, and gates 
still standing recall the palace to which the French 
monarchy retired when leisure or fatigue or mourn- 
ing withdrew it from Versailles; for it was a place 
more domestic and far less burdened with state. 

To the gates of that great country house there 
came near ten o'clock, just after the hour when full 
darkness falls on a midsummer evening, a great 

5 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

coach, driving from Versailles. It was the coach of 
the Archbishop of Paris, coming urgently to see the 
king, and the day was Friday, the nineteenth of 
June, 1789. They were in the full crisis that 
opened the Revolution. The tall windows of the 
palace were fully lit as the coach came up the drive. 
The night air was cold, for those June days were 
rainy and full of hurrying cloud. The Archbishop 
of Paris and liis colleague of Rouen, who was with 
him, were summoned by their titles into the room 
wliere Louis XVI sat discussing what should be 
done for the throne. 

Two days before, upon the Wednesday, the com- 
mons of the great Parliament — the Commons 
House in that great Parliament which had met 
again after a hundred years, and which now felt 
behind it the nation — had taken the first revolution- 
ary step and had usurped authority. The quarrel 
which had hampered all reform since this Parlia- 
ment of the States General had met six weeks 
before ; the refusal of the two privileged orders and 
particularly of the nobles to vote with the commons 
and to form with them one National Assembly ; the 
claim of the privileged orders and particularly of 

6 



THE ROYAL SEANCE 

the nobles to bar whatever the popular representa- 
tives might decide — all that had been destroyed in 
spirit by a new act of sovereignty. 

Using the title that was on all men's lips and call- 
ing themselves the "National Assembly" the com- 
mons had declared that the whole assembly was an 
indivisible body, and alone the organ of the nation. 
They had used with conscious purpose the solemn 
words, "Desires and decrees," which hitherto 
throughout all these centuries had never appeared 
above any seal or signature save that of a king. 
They had put body into this spiritual tiling by the 
enormous decision that no tax should be paid in 
the kingdom that had not their approval. 

This was the blow that had summoned the council 
round the king at Marly upon this Friday night. 
For now two anxious days doubtful issues and con- 
flicting policies had pulled Louis this way and that, 
whether to yield, whether to compromise, or whether 
to strike back. 

It was a fortnight since the sickly child who was 
heir to the throne had died, and this retirement of 
the royal family to Marly, consequent upon such 

7 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

mourning, was confused by the numbness of that 
shock also. The king perhaps more than the queen 
had suffered in his powers and judgment; for 
Marie Antoinette, the most vigorous and lucid of 
those gathered in council at Marly, the least na- 
tional, and the least wide in judgment, was active 
at this moment for the full claims of the crown. 

With her at the king's side in the taking of this 
crucial decision stood other advisers. The king's 
two brothers, the elder and the younger, who, as 
Louis XVIII and Charles X, were to rule after the 
restoration, and who were now known under the 
titles of Provence and Artois, were in the palace 
together. Provence, the elder, very dull and heart- 
less, was the more solid; Artois, the younger, 
empty, poor in judgment, was the least unattrac- 
tive. They counted for their rank, and even Prov- 
ence for little else. 

Barentin was there, the keeper of the seals. He 
was a man of very clear decision, of straightforward 
speech and manner; a man with something sword- 
like about him. He thought and said that the king 
had only to move troops and settle matters at once. 

There also, lit by the candles of that night, was 

8 




LOUIS-STANISLAS-XAVIER DE BOURBOX, COMTE DE PROVENCE, AFTERWARD LOUIS XVIII 

From a photograph by Braun, Clement & Co., New York, of a painting by Jean-Martial 

Fredou, belonging to Marquis de Virieu, at the Chateau de Lantilly 



THE ROYAL SEANCE 

the vacuous, puffed face of Necker, the miUionaire. 
This man, famous through his wealth, which was ill 
acquired and enormous, an alien in religion as in 
blood, had become, by one of those ironies in which, 
the gods delight, the idol of the national movement. 
He was pitifully inferior to such an opportunity, 
empty of courage, empty of decision, and almost 
empty of comprehension. No idea informed him 
unless it was that of some vague financial liberalism 
(rather, say, moral anarchy) suitable to the crooked 
ways by which he himself had arrived. Those pro- 
truding eyes, that loose mouth, and that lethargic, 
self-satisfied expression were the idol that stood in 
the general mind for the giant things that were 
coming. Behind such brass was reddening the cre- 
ative fire of the nation. Such a doorkeeper did 
Fate choose to open the gates for the armies of 
Marceau and Napoleon. All his advice was for 
something "constitutional." In days better suited 
for such men as he Necker would have been a poli- 
tician, and a parliamentary politician at that. 

To these, then, thus assembled entered the arch- 
bishops with their news. The news was this: that 
before sunset, just before they had left Versailles, 

11 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

the clergy had rallied to the commons. The bish- 
ops, indeed, all save four, had stood out for the 
privileged orders ; but the doubt in which all minds 
had been since the revolutionary step of forty-eight 
hours before was resolved. The clergy had broken 
rank with the nobles ; for that matter, many of the 
wealthier nobles were breaking rank, too. Deci- 
sion was most urgent; the moment was critical in 
the extreme, lest in a few hours the National As- 
sembly, already proclaimed, already half formed, 
should arise united and in full strength over against 
the crown. 

In not two hours after the arrival of the prelates 
the decision, nearly reached before they came, was 
finally taken by the king. He would follow 
Necker, and Necker was for a long, windy, compli- 
cated compromise. Necker was for a constitution, 
large, liberal, preventing the action of the popular 
life, preventing the yes and no of creative moods, 
leaving to the crown as much as would preserve its 
power to dissolve the States General and to sum- 
mon a new body less national — and, above all, less 
violent. There is an English word for this temper, 
the word "Whig." But that word is associated in 

12 



THE ROYAL SEANCE 

the English language with the triumph of wealth. 
Necker's muddy vision did not triumph. 

That decision was taken upon this Friday night, 
the nineteenth of June, 1789 — taken, I think, a 
little before midnight. Artois was off to bed, and 
Provence, too. The council was broken up. It 
was full midnight now when wheels were heard 
again upon the granite sets before the great doors, 
and the hot arrival of horses. The name an- 
nounced was that of Talleyrand, the Bishop of 
Autun, and the king, perhaps angrily, refused to 
see him. 

This man, with eyes like a ferret and an intelli- 
gence as keen as it was witty and narrow, a brad- 
awl of a mind, as invincible at intrigue as in vice, 
given up wholly to the search for personal advan- 
tage, had about him all that the plain piety of Louis 
XVI detested, and all that Louis XVI 's slow mind 
most feared. The king had made him Bishop of 
Autun against his every judgment, and only at the 
call of Talleyrand's fellow-clergymen, who loved 
their comrade's witty sallies against religion and his 
reputation of the brain. It was a reputation that 
had led Rome to consider the making of him a car- 

13 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

dinal, and only Louis himself had prevented it. 
For Louis profoundly believed. It was Louis who 
had said in those days just before the Revolution, 
"I will give no man the see of Paris who denies his 
God." 

Such was Talleyrand, thirty-five years of age, 
destined to compass the ruin of the French church, 
to ordain to the schismatic body which attempted 
to replace it, to be picked out by Danton for his 
very vices as a good emissary to Pitt, to be one of 
the levers of Napoleon, to be the man that handed 
the crown to Louis XVIII at the restoration. 
Such was the man, full of policy and of evil, whom 
on that midnight Louis XVI refused to see. 

The king refused to see him with the more deter- 
mination that Talleyrand had asked for a secret 
audience. Talleyrand sent a servant to the king's 
younger brother, Artois, who knew him well, and 
Artois, who was in bed, asked him to come to the 
bedroom to speak to him, which he did; and there 
in that incongruous place, to the empty-headed 
man lying abed listening to him, Talleyrand, till 
well after midnight, set forth what should be done. 
He also came, he said, hot-foot from Versailles, a 

14 




CHARLES MAUPJCE DE TALLEYRAND 



THE ROYAL SEANCE 
witness, and he had twenty times the grip of any 
of these others, he said, to seize what had happened. 
He offered, as such men do, a bargain. He had 
prepared it, as such men will, for immediate accep- 
tance; "all thought out," as people say to-day of 
commercial "propositions." Let him form a min- 
istry. (He had actually brought in his carriage 
with him certain friends who would support him in 
it!) They would rapidly summon military force, 
dissolve the assembly at once, erect a new one that 
would be at the service of the crown. Artois 
dressed and went to see the king. But his brother 
gave him short shrift, and bade him tell Talleyrand 
to go. Then Talleyrand, with that look in his eyes, 
I think, that was noted so often when, later, he 
found himself thwarted in any one of his million 
plots and forced to creep round by some new way, 
went out to serve the Revolution. 

At the same time there was sent through the 
night to Versailles the royal order, to be proclaimed 
by heralds, that no meeting of the Parliament 
should take place until the Monday when, in the 
commons' hall, the king would declare his will to 
all the three houses, clergy, commons, and nobles 

17 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

assembled; and that will, of course, was to be the 
muddled'Conipromise of Necker. 

These things done, they slept at last in Marly, 
and the very early dawn of the Saturday broke in 
a sky still troubled, rainy, and gray. 

Bailly, the president of the commons, sitting at 
Versailles, was a man such as are thrown to the 
surface in times of peace. He was honest and rich, 
a little paunchy, sober, and interested in astronomy. 
He was not without courage of the less vivid sort. 
He was fifty-three years of age. 

Bailly, the dignified spokesman of the commons 
in this awful crisis, was in his bed at Versailles, like 
everybody else except sentries, watchmen, and a 
few political intriguers, upon this very short sum- 
mer night of dull, rainy weather. They knocked at 
his door and woke him to bring him a note. It was 
a very curt note from the master of the ceremonies 
at the court. It told him that the great hall in 
which the commons met was not to be used by the 
commons that day, that Saturday; for it was to be 
decorated for the royal session of all the estates, to 
be held there upon the Monday, when the king 

18 



THE ROYAL SEANCE 

would address the States General together and tell 
them his will. 

It is not a weak spur to a man of such an age, 
especially if he is well to do, to have his dignity 
neglected and his sleep interrupted as well. Bailly 
had thought the commons worthy of more respect 
and of better notice. When, therefore, the mem- 
bers came, most of them under dripping umbrellas, 
to the door that should admit them to their great 
hall, Bailly was at their head as indignant as such 
a man could be. He found the door shut, a paper 
pinned upon it, whereon was written the royal 
order, and a sentry who told him and all his follow- 
ers that no one could come in save the workmen; 
for it would take all that day to prepare the hall 
for the royal meeting upon Monday. They let 
Bailly in to fetch his papers, no more. 

The commons went off under their umbrellas in 
the rain, a straggling procession of men, mostly 
middle class, in good black knee-breeches and 
coat, in dainty buckled shoes not meant for such 
weather, Bailly leading them; they made off, this 
dripping lot of them, and made history quickly 
and well. They found in an adjoining street an 

19 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

empty tennis-court at their disposal, and there they 
met, organized a session, and took the oath, with 
one dissentient, that they would not disperse until 
they had achieved a new constitution for the French. 
The French do things themselves, a point in 
which they differ from the more practical nations. 
For instance, Macmahon, the soldier and president, 
used to brush his own coat every morning. Baren- 
tin, the keeper of the seals, followed all this busi- 
ness, but he followed it in person. From the win- 
dow of a house just across the narrow way he him- 
self overlooked through the clearstory of the tennis- 
court the swarm of the commons within, the public 
audience that thronged the galleries or climbed to 
the sills of the windows. He saw the eagerness and 
the resolve. He scribbled a rough note to be sent 
at once' to Marly — a note that has come to light 
only in the last few years, "II faut couper court." 
That is, "End things up at once, or it will be too 
late." 

The royal session and the king's declaration were 
postponed. They did not take place upon the 
Monday for which they were planned; they were 

20 




JEAN-SYLVAIN BAILLY, PRESIDENT VF THE COMMONS IN 178i> 



THE ROYAL SEANCE 

put forward to the Tuesday, the twenty-third of 
June. What passed during those two days men 
will debate according as they are biased upon one 
side or the other of this great quarrel. Necker 
would have it in his memoirs that he was overborne 
by Barentin and, as one may say, by the queen's 
party; that his original compromise was made a 
little stronger in favor of the crown. To this 
change, like the weak and false man he was, he 
would ascribe all the breakdown that followed. I 
do not believe him. I think he lied. We know 
how he made his fortune, and we know how to con- 
trast the whole being of a man like Necker with 
the whole being of a man like Barentin. Read Ba- 
rentin's notes on those same two days, and you will 
have little doubt that Necker lied. That he mud- 
dled things worse through the delay and through 
the increasing gravity of the menace to the throne 
is probable enough. That he showed any vision 
or determination or propounded any strict policy 
is not morally credible. The document which the 
king was to read was drawn up wholly in his own 
hand, and he was wholly responsible. 

Now turn to Versailles upon the morning of that 

23 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

Tuesday, the twenty-third of June, 1789, the court 
having come in from Marly, and all being ready for 
the great occasion. Remember that in the interval 
the commons had met again ; the mass of the lower 
clergy had joined them, not by vote this time, but in 
person, and two archbishops and three bishops with 
them, and even from the nobles two men had 
come. 

It was therefore to be a set issue between the Na- 
tional Assembly now rapidly forming, that is, the 
commons triumphant, and the awful antique au- 
thority of the crown. 

If one had looked from the windows of the palace 
of Versailles upon that morning, still gray and 
rainy, still cold in weather, out toward the scene 
where so much was to be done, one would have 
caught beyond the great paved, semicircular place, 
beyond the gilded, high railings of the courtyard, 
in the central one of the three avenues, the broad 
road leading to Paris, the roof of a great barnlike 
building, a long parallelogram of stone and brick, 
with an oval skylight atop. There was but little to 
hide it, for the ground about was only begin- 
ning to be built over; young trees, just planted, 

24) 



THE ROYAL SEANCE 

marked each side of the road upon which one end 
of this building abutted. Within this hall, un- 
gainly, and oddly apparent above the lower roofs 
about it and the unfinished lower buildings of the 
quarter, was to be acted a drama which deflected 
and, as some believe, destroyed the immemorial in- 
stitution of personal government in Europe, and 
launched those experiments by which the French 
people in arms proposed to change the face of 
Christendom. 

Under the rain and in the cold air of that morn- 
ing there was not much movement in Versailles. 
The great desert of hard paving-stones before the 
gilded railings of the palace yard was almost empty 
save of troops, and these, not yet arrived in very 
gi'eat numbers, seemed to be doing the work of a 
police rather than of an army. They were drawn 
up in lines that cut the Paris road and its ap- 
proaches, guarding on all sides this hall of the 
commons. The side streets which led past the back 
doors of that hall, the Street of St. Martin and the 
Street of the Works, had each their cordon of men. 
Small groups of soldiery, not patrolling, but watch- 
ing, were distributed here and there. 

25 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

The eye caught in the ghstening, empty spaces 
of that wet, gray morning the red of the Swiss 
Guard and the blue and white of the mihtia. Be- 
yond these uniforms there was little else; no crowd 
was yet gathered. Nor was there as yet any pa- 
rade or any standing to arms. 

The ear could no more judge Versailles that 
morning than the eye. The rain was too soft for 
any noise, the early life of the town too dulled un- 
der such weather to send up any echo from the 
streets. But there could still be distinguished from 
that quarter of a mile away the occasional sound 
of hammering where the workmen within the hall 
were finishing the last of its decorations for the 
ceremony that was to take place that day. It was 
a little before nine o'clock in the morning. 

That large hall had its main entrance upon the 
new wide, bare Avenue de Paris, with its sprigs of 
trees. Years before it had been built to house the 
rackets and the tennis nets, perhaps the scenery of 
plays — all the material of the lesser pleasures of the 
court; for which reason it was still called the 
"Menus-Plaisirs," that is, the "Petty Leisures." 
It had stood for some forty years, and the things 

26 



THE ROYAL SEANCE 

to be warehoused had come in by its principal open- 
ing upon this great main road. 

By this main door you might have seen, under 
the rain, one after another entering as the morning 
wore on to ten o'clock. Some came on foot, most 
in the carriages of their equipage; but every indi- 
vidual, driven or walking, first halted at the line 
of armed men that barred the avenue, showed a 
card to prove that he was a deputy, cleric, or noble, 
and only then was let through. But though the 
public gathered slowly (in such weather!) the care- 
ful policing of the streets by these armed men was 
maintained, and the lines of red and blue still stood 
across the Avenue de Paris. They so came slowly 
up and in, the two privileged orders for one hour, 
six hundred in all. 

The hour drew to its close. Before the bugles 
up in the low, wooded heights to the south had 
sounded for the ten o'clock meal of the camp, be- 
fore the hour had struck from the clocks of the 
churches, files drew up to line the street on each 
side, and a guard stood before the porch. 

Much farther down the road, beyond a second 
line of soldiery which barred access from that far 

29 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

side also, a small, but gathering, crowd of citizens 
showed far and small. Mixed with them and pass- 
ing through them were figures hurrying toward a 
narrow side street which ran to a back entrance of 
the Menus-Plaisirs — men in knee-breeches and 
short coats, all in blaclv, solemn. Those distant fig- 
ures in black thus mixing with the crowd and get- 
ting in by a back way were the commons, the men 
who had just claimed to be all France, to be sov- 
ereign. They had not been permitted to come in 
by the main door of their hall ; they were under or- 
ders to reach the place in this fashion by the meaner 
street behind it. 

Even that back door was shut against them. Of 
the four thousand soldiers all told who formed the 
ornament, the patrol, and the barriers of those 
streets, one guard was set at this closed back door 
forbidding entry. The six hundred commons, 
crowded and pushing under their dripping umbrel- 
las, began loud complaints, suggested protests, 
egged on their officials and in particular their presi- 
dent. He, Bailly, the middle-aged astronomer, 
full of rectitude, simple, and pompous, still called it 
an insult to be kept thus. But the guard had no 

30 



THE ROYAL SEANCE 

orders and would not open. Such citizens as had 
assembled in the street mixed now with the com- 
mons, supported their indignation. The rain still 
fell. 

It was not until nearly a full horn- had passed, 
until a commotion farther up toward the palace, 
and the shouted presenting of arms announced the 
arrival of the king that these six hundred, now at 
the limit of their restrained and profound exaspera- 
tion, were at last admitted to the ramshackle 
wooden corridor that was their only vestibule. 
They folded their umbrellas, shook the rain from 
their cloaks, and, hat under arm, filed through the 
inner way which led to the back of tlie hall. Thus 
did they meanly enter it last, humiliated and angry, 
they who would be the nation itself. 

The commons filed in two by two through the 
side door at the end of the great hall. They saw 
before them, under the great veiled, oval skylight 
of the place, the ranks of the clergy and of the 
nobles already assembled, rows deep, upon each 
side of the central gangway. They saw the throne, 
with its noble hangings roof high and spangled 
with lilies, upon the raised platform at the farther 

31 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

end. They saw the whole place draped and painted 
and upholstered as it had been for the great cere- 
mony of the Parliament's opening seven weeks be- 
fore. It was eleven o'clock. 

Upon the king's right the queen, suffering some- 
what from that theatrical dignity which had been 
the bane of her carriage at the court, and had so 
offended the French sense of measure, courtesied 
deep, and would not be seated while the king still 
stood. Before the throne the ministry sat in rank ; 
but one chair was empty, and all men gazed at it. 
It was amazing that this chair should be empty, for 
it was the chair of the chief minister : it was Neck- 
er's chair. 

What was about to be done was Necker's doing. 
It was he who had written the words the king was 
to read. But that very morning he had grown 
afraid. He had ordered his carriage to take him 
with the rest; then, seeing how feeling had risen, 
persuaded partly by his women, partly by a native 
duplicity, that something was to be gained by a 
dramatic absence and a show of displeasure at what 
he knew would clash with opinion, he had at the last 
moment shirked and remained at home. He be- 

32 







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1 

1 




JACQUES XECKER, RECTOR-GEXERAL OF FINANCES 



THE ROYAL SEANCE 

trayed the king by that shu-king. He left it to be 
thought that he was not the author of his own 
words. Unhke most traitors, he reaped no reward. 

Whether rumors of what was to come had leaked 
out or not we cannot tell. Some of that great au- 
dience afterward said that they knew what was to- 
ward, and certainly among the two privileged or- 
ders there were a few who had heard the tenor of 
the speech. There were even one or two among 
the commons. But for the great bulk of those who 
waited curiously for the fruition of so dreadful a 
moment, the fruit of that moment was still un- 
known until the herald announced his cry, until the 
rustle of seating was over, and the king spoke. 

What he spoke in his simple, good-natured, 
rather thick voice was, for those who heard it, enor- 
mous. His first words raised the issue directly be- 
fore men had well realized the shock — the royal 
authority was advising a reversal of all that had 
been done in the six days: 

"I thought, gentlemen, that I had done all in 
my power for the good of my subjects. . . . The 
States General [not the National Assembly'] have 
been open now near two months, and they are not 

35 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

yet agreed upon the preliminaries of their busi- 
ness. ... It is my duty, it is a duty which I owe 
to the common weal, and to my realm and to my- 
self, to end these divisions. ... I come to repress 
whatever has been attempted against the laws." 

He sat down, and every phrase in the five min- 
utes or so of the declaration drawn up for him had 
seemed to the commons and their partizans a chal- 
lenge. 

The king's face, if witnesses may be trusted, 
showed some surprise. There is an air in assem- 
blies which can be felt, though not defined, and the 
dense rows in black at the end of the hall were 
hostile. 

Barentin came up the steps of the throne and 
knelt, as custom demanded, then turned and said in 
a loud voice, "The king orders you to be cov; 
ered." 

Bailly put on his hat, sundry of his commons fol- 
lowed his example. The privileged orders for some 
reason made no such gesture. In the passions of 
the moment it was thought that they deliberatelj'^ 
insulted the third order, as though not caring for 
the privilege of remaining covered before the king, 

36 



THE ROYAL SEANCE 

if the commons were to share that i^rivilege. At 
any rate, Bailly nervously uncovered again, and 
those who had followed his example followed it 
once more. There was a little laughter, a little 
subdued challenging. They ceased as the articles 
of the king's main declaration — Necker's document 
— were read for him by his minister. 

There were twenty-five of them; each was short, 
and their delivery no great matter in time. But 
in effect they were capital. They maintained the 
separation of the three orders. They broke the 
unity of the National Assembly. They permitted 
common sessions, only upon questions conmion to 
all. 

Louis spoke again for a moment. Next were 
read the thirty-five articles Necker meant for a 
"liberal" constitution to the nation. 

Those who have attended the ritual of assemblies 
know how superficial and imperfect is the effect 
of such a preliminary single reading. Men strain 
their ears for this point and for that, but they 
do not grasp the details of what has been put before 
them. What reaches from the lips of the reader to / 
his audience is not, as in book-work, a precise and 

37 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

complete plan; it is only a general effect. Those 
thirty-five articles, droned out in the official ac- 
cent, liberally as many of them were interpreted 
upon a further study, tolerably coordinated as they 
may have seemed to Necker and to those who 
drafted them in the clique of the council-chamber, 
meant for the commons a direct challenge. And 
the commons were right. The French Revolution 
was not permitted for politicians' work of this kind. 
Flame is not made for pap. Yet challenging as 
Necker's futilities were to the ardor of the time, 
it was not they that determined the gravity of that 
short hour. What determined it was the last and 
third speech of the king. 

Louis rose for the third time at the conclusion 
of this reading, and in brief sentences told them 
they had heard his will. He reminded them that 
they could do nothing without his specific approba- 
tion; he used the famous phrase that, if he were 
abandoned in his enterprise, "he would alone carry 
out the good of his peoples." His last sentence 
was this: 

"I order you, gentlemen, to separate at once, 
and to-morrow to come each of you to the place set 

38 



THE ROYAL SEANCE 

apart for your respective orders, there to resume 
your debates. To this effect I have ordered the 
grand master of ceremonies to prepare the places 
where you are to meet." 

During each brief interlude of the king's own 
speaking all had j)reserved a profound attention. 
During the reading of the articles there had been 
now and then a slight applause, especially from cer- 
tain of the nobles at the article in favor of the old 
feudal dues, and to that applause there had come 
isolated cries of "Silence!" from the commons. 
Nothing else had disturbed the ease, the dignity, 
and the rapidity of this one hour pregnant with 
war. One hour, for it was eleven when the king 
first entered; as he rose to dismiss them and leave 
the hall it was noon. 

When the king had passed behind the glorious, 
roof-high curtains of the throne, and so gone 
out, there was a noise of men moving. 

All the three hundred of the nobility rose and 
followed him. A great number of the clergy — 
most of that order — came after. The hall was left 
desolate in its center; most desolate where its great 
empty dais, splendid with the purple drapings and 

41 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

the embroidered lilies of gold, and the empty throne 
dominated the floor below. 

The far end and the dark aisles behind the col- 
umns were still filled with the commons in a crowd. 
Some remained still seated, some few more had 
risen; all were keeping silent, and only a very few 
crept shamefacedly along the walls toward the 
doors. 

With the commons there now mixed such of the 
clergy as had dared to remain, and not a few of 
the public audience; of these last many lingered 
curiously, hanging on in the corners and sides of 
the place, watching for what was to come. 

One could not see from that hall any part of the 
life without. Its windows were high. Its prin- 
cipal light was from the glazed, oval skylight in the 
roof, covered and tempered by a veil of cloth. One 
could not hear the crowd which had gathered out- 
side in the broad avenue to see the king and his 
coaches go by, and which remained in great num- 
bers to attend the exit of the commons when these 
should leave. That inner place was isolated. But 
the seven or eight hundred men standing at bay 
therein could feel all about them the great mass of 

42 



THE ROYAL SEANCE 
soldiery upon the heights in the woods, the regi- 
ments marching in from the frontiers, the gather- 
ings of mob and of armed men against them down 
the valley in Paris, two hours away — all the ex- 
pectancy of arms. 

Workmen entered to remove the hangings and 
to dismantle the hall. Still the commons kept 
their places, as yet undecided; no general decision 
taken, none proposed, but yet the mass of them 
unmoving, and by their mere unmoving refusing 
the command of the crown. 

It was at this moment, before as yet the artisans 
had begun their business of ladders and hammer- 
ing, that there came out from the robing-room and 
from behind the cloths of the throne a figure with 
which the ceremony of the States General had al- 
ready rendered them familiar : it was young Dreux 
Breze, elegant, a trifle effeminate, little more than a 
boy. He carried his white wand of the master of 
ceremonies, as he had carried it when the session 
opened, and his person was, by the costume of his 
office, all gold and plumes and many diamonds. 

He performed his simple duty: he came up to 
Bailly, the president, and said: 

43 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

"Sir, you heard the order of the king?" 

Bailly answered in silence, while men craned for- 
ward to hear : 

"Sir, the Assembly stands adjourned only by 
its own vote. I cannot disperse it until it has de- 
bated upon that adjournment." A pompous rig- 
marole enough, but thick with coming years. 

Said young Breze: 

"Am I to give that to the king as your reply?" 

And Bailly answered: 

"Yes." 

Then, turning to his colleagues, Bailly had be- 
gun to give his reasons to them, when he found 
striding up to his side, and facing Breze, the heavy 
vigor of Mirabeau. It was Mirabeau, so striding 
up, who in his powerful voice interposed. With 
no official right to mandate, he spoke most famous 
words, of which tradition has made a varied and 
doubtful legend, but which were in substance these : 

"Go tell those that sent you we are here by the 
will of the nation." He added either that force 
alone (of bayonets or what-not) could drive the 
commons out, or, as some say, that such force was 
powerless. 




EMANUEL JOSEPH SIEYES 



/ 



A IVis,chez I'AuTEUR, Quay dca Augij{ljns N^/i aa .3' 



EMMANUEL-JOSEPH SIEYES, DEPUTY FROM PARIS TO THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY 



THE ROYAL SEANCE 
Even as he said it, Breze, having his answer from 
the official head of the commons, thus recalcitrant, 
moved away. The custom of the court was on him, 
and he moved out backward with his white wand. 
Of the men who saw that piece of ritual, some said 
within themselves that the thing was a sign, and 
that sovereignty had passed from the Bourbons. 

When he had gone there was silence again for a 
little while. It was broken by the workmen setting 
to their labor of dismantling the hall. Bailly or- 
dered them to cease, and they obeyed the order. 

The genius of the French people for decision 
and for manifold cooperation appeared again and 
again throughout the Revolution, in debate, in 
street fighting, upon the battle-field. Nowhere did 
it appear more clearly than at this origin of all the 
movement. 

Without traditional procedure, with no waiting 
on initiative from above, at this moment spontane- 
ous and collective action decided all. 

One voice, proposing an adjournment until to- 
morrow, was voted down at once. Next Sieyes, 
with his firm, accurate mouth, pronounced a graven 
phrase expressing the mind of all: "You are to- 

47 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

day what you were yesterday." Immediately, 
upon the motion of Camus, a man too legal, but 
well able to define, the commons and such of the 
clergy as had remained with them voted unani- 
mously their contradiction to the throne. They 
voted that all that they had passed, and all that 
they had done, they still maintained. 

As the hands which had been raised everywhere 
to vote this motion fell again, the corner of French 
liistory was turned, and those curious to choose a 
precise point at which the outset of any matter may 
be set, should choose that moment of the fall of 
those hundreds of hands for the origin of modern 
Europe, its vast construction, its still imperiled ex- 
periment. 

One thing more remained to be done, though the 
general sense of those present did not at first grasp 
its necessity; the proposal and the carrying of it 
proceeded from the vivid sanity of Mirabeau. He 
it was who proposed that they should vote the in- 
violability of themselves, the deputies of the nation. 

To pass that decree meant that if the Assembly 
should win, it would have, for the punishment of 
any that had attempted to defeat it by force, the 

48 



THE ROYAL SEANCE 

awful weapon which a solemn declaration of inten- 
tion gives. But it also meant that if the commons 
were defeated, they had been guilty of treason, 

Bailly, perhaps from confusion, perhaps from 
timidity, himself hesitated, until Mirabeau, under- 
standing well what force it is that governs men, 
said: 

"If you do not pass this motion, sixty of us, 
and you the first, will be arrested this very night." 

A column of troops had already been formed out- 
side the doors, though the decision to act at once 
was, perhaps in fear of Paris, not acted on by the 
crown. Five hundred and twenty-seven men 
passed the decree, and of these thirty-four voted 
"No," four hundred and ninety-three, "Yes." Its 
operative words are significant: 

The National Assembly declares . . . that every 
individual corporation, tribunal, court or commis- 
sion, which may dare during or after the present 
session to pursue, seek out, arrest, or cause to be 
arrested ... a deputy upon the ground of any 
profession, advice, opinion, or speech made by him 
in the States General, no matter by whom such at- 

49 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

tempts may be ordered, are guilty of treason and 
subject to capital punishment. 

This voted, there was no more to be done. 

The many men who had thus risked all looked at 
one another; Bailly declared the session at an end. 
They came out upon the crowds that still waited 
in the lifting weather outside, that cheered a little, 
and that wonderingly followed the dispersion of the 
deputies to their homes. 

The king and those who had left with him had 
lunched at the midday hour. They were past their 
coffee when the business of their antagonists was 
thus accomplished. The commons and the curious 
who had waited in the streets for their exit were late 
for luncheon that day. 

In a week, and two days more than a week, the 
battle was won. The clergy in a body had come in, 
the nobles in batch after batch, the National As- 
sembly was fully comjDosed at last, and Louis him- 
self, writing to the privileged orders — such as still 
refused — to bow to the commons, had accepted de- 
feat, and his sovereignty was never from that mo- 
ment full. 

50 




GABRIEL HONORE RIQUETTI, COMTE DE MIRABEAU 



PART TWO 

THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 



I 



INTRODUCTION 

After the successful assertion by the commons of their 
new usurped powers over the crown, as described in our 
first paper, a second attempt at coercion, backed by the 
foreign mercenary troops in the service of the king, failed. 
The depots of arms at the Invalides and the Bastille in 
Paris were sacked by the populace, and the latter was taken 
by force upon the same day, July 14«, 1789. The first 
principles of the Revolution were laid in resolutions of the 
parliament at Versailles during the summer, notably the 
declaration known as that of the "Rights of Man" and 
the abolition of the feudal property of the nobility. 

Another popular rising in the capital in the month of 
October brought the court back to Paris, and the parlia- 
ment followed it. For eighteen months the tide of demo- 
cratic reform rose with greater and greater violence, and 
while the crown still remained the sole executive of the na- 
tion, possessed of all immediate control over the regular 
armed forces and the disbursement of public money, the 
personal peril of the royal family grew greater, and the 
term within which it seemed certain that the executive 
would lose its authority drew near. 

There stood between the monarchy — the one vital insti- 
tution of the French — and its ruin no real forces save the 
personality of Mirabeau and the regular troops. As 

55 



INTRODUCTION 

against the latter there had been raised and organized a 
considerable militia, duly armed by law and present in 
every village and town in the country ; while the mass of 
the regular troops had purposely been stationed at a dis- 
tance from Paris through the growing power of the par- 
liament. 

A foreign war was threatened through the desire of 
every ancient authority in Europe to repress the move- 
ment, and with the approaching threat of invasion, which 
could not but serve the king, the unpopularity, and there- 
fore the danger, of his family grew greater still. 

Mirabeau, who dominated the parliament by his person- 
ality even more than by his oratory and his prodigious in- 
dustry, had secretly entered into the service of the court in 
his determination to save the monarchy, in the fall of 
which he believed would be involved the breakdown of the 
country. He had drawn up a regular plan presupposing 
and inviting civil war. He would have the king leave 
Paris for some post such as Compiegne, not more than a 
day's posting away, and from that point appeal to the 
people and to the army to support him. All this work of 
Mirabeau was being done in the winter of 1790-91. 

Meanwhile the personal alarm of the queen, backed by 
her rare energy, preferred a complete flight with her hus- 
band and children, either to the frontier itself or beyond 
it, a total undoing of the Revolution if that flight were 
successful, and the return of the monarchy, backed not 
only by the army, but by the threat of foreign powers and 
of invasion. 

56 




■A^Jrer^li«ltiiiwftiJWi«Ji mni jt.M..uit.S^ 



INTRODUCTION 

In this perhaps impracticable and too heroic scheme, 
utterly anti-national, her great ally was Fersen, a Swedish 
nobleman who had loved her with devotion from his first 
youth, and whom she, since her misfortunes began, liad 
come to love as devotedly in return. 

It seems certain that the overmastering ability of Mira- 
beau would have carried his plan and would probably have 
saved the French monarchy had he lived. But he died 
from overwork upon the second of April, 1791, and with 
him lacking, nothing could prevent the maturing of the 
queen's plan. 

A fortnight after Mirabeau's death the mob had pre- 
vented the king from leaving Paris, in a perfectly open 
manner, for a visit to one of his suburban palaces, and 
the great militia guard of the palace had not shown dis- 
cipline or loyalty. 

After that nothing remained but to fix a date for secret 
flight, and this date was ultimately fixed for the night of 
the twentieth of June. 

Fersen worked out all the plans in detail. He had the 
great traveling-coach, or berlin, specially built; the com- 
mander of the army upon the eastern frontier, Bouille, 
was warned and provided posts to receive the fugitives 
when they should have proceeded a little more than a hun- 
dred miles from Paris, and to conduct them in safety to 
Montmedy upon the extreme frontier; whence, when he 
should safely have reached it, the king was to issue his 
proclamation to the army and to the people. The travel- 
ing disguises for the royal family were prepared; three 

59 



INTRODUCTION 

gentlemen of their former guard were trusted to accom- 
pany the flight. A passport in the name of Mme. de KorfF, 
a Russian lady resident in Paris, was obtained, and the 
queen was to travel in that name with her two children, 
and her husband as a servant. 



60 



PART TWO 

THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 

UPON the evening of Monday, the twentieth 
of June, 1791, a httle before nine o'clock, 
Axel de Fersen was leaning, with his chin in his 
hands, his elbows upon the parapet, looking over 
the bridge called the Pont Royal, which leads from 
the Tuileries to the southern bank of the Seine. 
He watched the dying light upon the river below, 
and waited with desperate impatience in liis heart, 
his body lounging in affected indolence. 

The sky above was cloudy. The day had been 
hot, but its last hours not sunlit. A freshness was 
now coming up from the Seine over the town, and 
the noises of life and movement that rise with the 
closing of the working hours in the capital filled the 
streets. He was dressed in the rough habit of a 
cabman, and the poor coach of which he had the 
driving stood in rank with others a little way from 
the gate of the palace. 

61 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

As he so gazed, two men, one with a sunken, long- 
jawed face and small, peering eyes, the other frail, 
slight, and younger, both dressed in a faded yellow 
livery as of servants to some rich man of a time be- 
fore the Revolution had abolished liveries, came up 
to him. He knew already who they were. They 
were Moustier and Valory, two gentlemen of the 
king's disbanded guard who, in the disguise of serv- 
ants, had volunteered to serve Louis in his flight. 
Fersen gave them the instructions that they 
awaited, for one was to find and conduct the great 
coach he had had built and to keep it waiting for 
Fersen at the gates of the city ; the other was to act 
as outrider and to go before to prepare the relays. 
A third. Maiden, remained hidden in the apart- 
ments of the king. 

Night fell, an hour passed, and two women in the 
conduct of a man who hurried them across the 
bridge were put into a chaise that there awaited 
them and drove off. Fersen knew that mission 
also. These were the two waiting-women of the 
queen, going on ahead through the night to the sec- 
ond posting-station at Claye upon the eastern road. 
A little while later — it was eleven o'clock, or a little 

62 




WX 



•^» ' iMy\\ *<#*^«--, s.'"i<i 



^;ii>3^^'i"^r*='f^- 









m 



•,^/M\\01 










' ' VIVE LE ROI ! VIVE LA NATION ! ' ' 
A Cartoon of 1789 



THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 

past — a woman came to him leading two children, 
two girls, it seemed, one old enough to walk alone, 
the other whom she held by the hand. It was 
JNIme. de Tourzel, the governess of the royal chil- 
dren. The elder girl was the princess royal. The 
young child, disg-uised as her sister, was the dau- 
phin, the httle heir to the throne. Many were go- 
ing in and out of the palace at that moment. This 
small group in somber clothing drew no one's eye 
in the half-light. The children were put into the 
cab, the woman followed, and Fersen, with the most 
cabman-like way in the world, climbed slowly up to 
his box and drove at a very quiet pace westward 
along the quay that flanks the Tuileries gardens. 
He came to the great open place which to-day is 
called the Place de la Concorde, where the half- 
finished bridge had only just lost its last work- 
man with the end of the day; he turned to the 
right across its paving and up the rue Royale 
until he came to the narrow rue St. Honore, where 
again he turned his shabby team to the right and 
drove as leisurely eastward. 

There is a place, now rebuilt out of all recogni- 
tion, the ways broadened, all the houses modern, 

65 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

where a street still called by the name of "Ladder 
Street" (the rue de rEchelle) comes into the rue 
St. Honore. It is a very short street leading to- 
ward the palace. Between the Tuileries and those 
few yards of way there stood in those days a num- 
ber of great houses, the homes of certain nobles who 
had been about the court, and in the midst of their 
confused carved fronts was an archway that led 
to the royal stables, and by a narrow lane to the 
courtyard of the palace itself. 

In that Street of the Ladder Fersen halted, 
drawing his cab up toward the curb. The long 
detour over which he had purposely lingered had 
taken him nearly three quarters of an hour ; it was 
near twelve. He got down from the box, went to 
the carriage window, and said a word or tw^o, bid- 
ding the woman and the two children wait in 
patience. Then he paced up and down the rough 
paving as midnight deepened, sauntering in the 
fashion of cabmen that await a fare. 

Such light as there was between the high houses 
came from dim oil lamps slung from wall to wall 
and far apart. There was light also in the guard- 
room at the corner of the archwa}^ and there a 

66 



THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 

militiaman stood sentry with fixed bayonet, for 
every issue from the palace was thus guarded. The 
street was full of people coming and going from 
that little town the Tuileries, and as the hour wore 
on, the great equipages of those who attended court 
passed in to take their masters up at the royal porch 
and passed out again on their way homeward. 

Fersen knew that the last ceremonies would not 
be over until very late, but that did not relieve 
his increasing anxiety. The darkness seemed to 
grow more profound as he waited. He watched 
with as little show as might be the throngs that 
passed back and forth through the archway ; he saw 
no figure of those he was awaiting until, M^hen it was 
quite dark — for though there was a moon, the cur- 
tain of clouds was thick — he saw, or thought he saw, 
seated upon a stone bench against one of the great 
houses a woman whose attitude even in that gloom 
he thought he knew. With the same leisurely pace 
of a man free from employment he sauntered past, 
noted the gray dress and broad, gray veiled hat 
under the dim light of the distant lamps, and the 
veil about the face, and coming closer still, knew 
that it was Madame Elizabeth, the king's sister. 

67 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

He spoke in a whisper, without turning to her or 
stopping as he went slowly by. He made an im- 
perceptible movement of the head toward the cab, 
saying, "They wait for you." She did not move, 
and he feared for a moment that she might not have 
understood what he had said or recognized him, for 
he dared not linger. He paced back again toward 
his charge and again whispered the words as he 
passed, still looking down at the ground; and this 
time the woman rose, went to the cab, and entered 
it. 

The lights behind the shutters of the great houses 
had gone out, the distant noises in the palace hard 
by had ceased, the last of the equipages were rum- 
bling through the archwa}^, and still there was no 
sign of new-comers for him. It was long past mid- 
night, nearly one o'clock. Another of the cabmen 
in the rank spoke to him. He answered as best he 
could with the manner, accent, and slang of the 
trade. He oflFered this unwelcome friend a pinch 
of snuff from a rough box; then he went back as 
though to look to his horses, felt their legs, stood 
about them a little, and patted them. 

There was still, but very rarely, a belated servant 

68 



yy^T^ 




/Z.X^.Ti^.AL. 



L. I u:imJ. JUfHt/L't' 



THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY PETRIFIED. THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY REVIVIFIED 
Caricatures bj- Gillray 



THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 

or so i^assing out from under the arch, and at last, 
when his fever of expectation was at the height, he 
distinguished two such, a man and a woman, com- 
ing toward him unhurriedly. As they came nearer, 
and the feeble ghmmer of the lamps showed them 
less confusedly, he marked the lumbering walk of 
the man. He wore a round soft hat, and a big 
overcoat against the freshness of the night air, and 
had the air of a familiar upper servant. At his 
side, with an upright gait and a certain poise of the 
head that Fersen knew, alas! for him, better than 
anything else on earth, went the woman. Fersen 
went forward, mastering his respect, and led them 
to the carriage; and then, without delay, but still 
careful to give no cause for remark by his haste, he 
drove northward over the loud granite sets of the 
streets. 

By what tortuous ways Fersen drove the king 
and his family one may hardly guess. They were 
puzzled to find him following many street turnings 
other than those that would lead them to the near- 
est gate of the city on the north and so to the great 
frontier road. But Fersen did what he did know- 
ingly. It was his business in this turn of the night 

71 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

to make sure that the last point of his plan had 
been obeyed and that the great traveling-carriage 
had gone on before and was waiting for them out- 
side the limits of the city. He called at the stables 
and found one trusted servant of his to assure him 
that the thing had been sent and that all was ready. 
Then only did he turn toward the east and the north 
and make for the barrier at the end of the rue St. 
Martin, which was then the gate of Paris and the 
beginning of straggling houses and the open coun- 
try. 

/They did not reach that barrier till two o'clock, 
and already they breathed some faint air of morn- 
ing. No one challenged them. It was one cab like 
another, driving to the suburbs with some belated 
middle-class party that had dined in Paris that 
night. There were lights and music still in the 
house of the gate-keeper at the barrier, for there 
had been a wedding in his family that day, and they 
were feasting. After the glare of that light, Fer- 
sen looked in vain through the darkness for the 
berhn. Then, with some few minutes so lost, he 
saw the black hump at last drawn up well to the 
right and close to the bordering ditch. The 

72 



THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 

guardsman, Moustier, and Balthazar, his own 
coachman, were sitting their horses immovable. 
They had waited thus immovable for some hours 
through the night. Very rapidly the travelers 
passed from the cab to the traveling-coach, and 
leaned back in the comfortable white velvet cushions 
of its upholstering. Fersen himself, sending back 
the cab I know not how, took his place upon the 
broad box of the berlin, and the four horses felt the 
traces and started. The journey had begun. 

Toward the northeast, to which the great road 
ran, there was already a hint of dawn, and great 
Paris just behind would not sleep long into the 
light. Therefore the horses, Fersen's own, with 
only a short stage before them, were urged to a vig- 
orous pace through the short, lonely suburb and 
still more lonely fields beyond, and Fersen's coach- 
man, who rode as postilion upon the leader, spared 
them little. 

It was near three o'clock when they reached the 
first posting-house at Bondy, three miles from the 
boundary of the city, and just outside the wall and 
railings of the park in that place. The guardsman 
Valory, who was outrider, had been there for an 

73 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

hour; the six horses for the carriage were awaiting 
it, and the two horses which he and the third guards- 
man, Maiden, were to ride to the next stage. As 
they unharnessed Fersen's steaming beasts, Fersen 
himself, as coachman coming down from the box, 
waited a moment until the fresh team was in and 
the postilions mounted. Then he looked in at the 
window of the coach, and taking off his hat to the 
queen, he said, "Good-by, Madame de Korff," and 
under the growing light would no longer linger. 
He was off at once by the by-lane to the Brussels 
road beyond. He and those whom he had so 
worked to save were to meet at Montmedy. 

The postihons urged on their mounts, the short 
whips cracked, and they were gone. Fersen saw 
the great mass go swaying up the road, dark against 
the growing dawn, and went off lonely upon his 
separate flight to the north. 

As for the travelers, touched by that effect of 
morning which all feel, by the unnatural exhilara- 
tion of those strained hours of no sleep, and of a re- 
lease apparently begun, they broke into making 
plans for their disguise, reassuring themselves with 
every mile that passed and feeling the first sense of 

74 




MADAME ELISABETH 

From a photograph by Brann, Clement & Co., New York, of a painting by Mme. Vigee 

Lebrun, in the possession of Mme. la Marquise du Blaisdel 



THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 

}-elief that they had known for two strained years. 
The sleepy little boy who was their fortune and the 
heir was set more comfortably back against the 
white cushions in his girl's clothes that he might rest. 
The five others, wakeful and eager, pretended to 
learn their roles. Mme. de Tom'zel was to be the 
mistress; the queen, the governess Rochet; the 
Princess Elizabeth, a companion; and the king a 
steward under the name of Durand. There was 
almost a spirit of comedy in the coach. The king 
talked of his new liberty and of riding, perhaps of 
the autumn hunting that he loved; and they con- 
versed also of the nature of their journey, where — 
and upon this perhaps they were more guarded — 
there might be peril, especially as they passed 
through the one considerable town of Chalons ; but 
also of how, not two hours beyond that place, at 
Somme-Vesle, a posting-house in the midst of 
Champagne, they would meet the first troop of 
their chain-mounted escorts thrust out from the 
army, and how with these they would henceforward 
be safe. 

They were late. They were already a full hour 
behind the time-table that men who understood the 

77 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

essentials of order as the king had never understood 
them had laid down for their guidance. But the 
pace was brisk, the road was passing swiftly by, 
and the accident of such trifling unpunctuality so 
early in their adventure did not oppress them. 
There was no one with them accustomed to com- 
mand or to understand the all-importance of exacti- 
tude in any military affair. 

That little company, if we think of it, was an iso- 
lated thing and most imperfect for such a task: 
three women bred to a court and to the habits of 
leisure or of successive pleasures ; two children ; the 
unwilled, heavy king and husband, who never did 
or could decide, and whose judgment was slow to 
the point of disease. Beyond these were only the 
three guardsmen, almost servants. 

At Claye, the next relay, they found the queen's 
two waiting-women, who, abandoned for hours, had 
awaited them in their chaise, and were bewildered, 
wondering if they were lost. From Claye onward, 
the sun having now risen, though hidden behind the 
level roof of clouds, and the day fully begun, they 
passed through fields without villages, with scarcely 
a house, where the peasants in the eager work of the 

78 



THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 

high summer were ah*eady abroad. The fourfold 
rank of great trees which dignified the road went 
by in monotonous procession. The quick change 
of horses at Meaux raised their hopes still higher, 
and as they opened their picnic-bags, bringing out 
bread and meat and wine to break their fast, they 
spoke in jests, increasingly secure. To Maiden 
riding by the carriage door, the queen beckoned, 
and offered wine and food, and she told him fa- 
miliarly of how the king had laughed roundly, say- 
ing that Lafayette, the master of the militia in 
Paris, and officially the guardian of the court, 
would be woundily puzzled that day. So much for 
that fresh early morning when all was well. 

The wide royal road, full of the Roman inheri- 
tance, breasts beyond Meaux a sharp, high, wooded 
hill, and the drag up that hill was long ; upon its far- 
ther side, on to the Marne again, goes a sharp pitch 
down which the shrieking brakes betrayed an equal 
delay. It was fully eight o'clock when they had 
come along the riverside to the lovely valley of the 
Sellot, winding between its wooded guardian hills 
to join the greater river. 

There two roads part, each leading equally to 

79 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

Chalons and to the east; the main one still follows 
the Marne, but the second, somewhat shorter, cuts 
across the plateau to the south of the river, which 
few, even in the traveling of to-day, know, and 
which those who had planned the flight had chosen 
on account of its few towns and villages and less 
frequented inns. Yet it was precisely in this 
chosen stretch of thirty miles, by this less-fre- 
quented lower road to Chalons, that their evil was to 
come upon them. 

The hour's delay which one accident and another 
— the lateness of the moment in which the last of the 
court had left the palace, the slight time lost in 
peering for the berlin through the darkness at the 
gate, the long drag up and down the forest of 
Meaux — had burdened them with, was now per- 
haps more nearly grown to an hour and a half ; but 
not one of that little company could guess how 
much this meant, or how such errors breed of them- 
selves and add, how one strained and anxious man, 
watching during that Tuesday at the head of a 
little troop of horse in the lonely plains beyond 
Chalons, would be broken, and with him all their 
fortunes, by such incapacity. For save where it 

80 



THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 

walked the hills, as heavy coaches must, the berlin 
went bravely enough, covering its eight miles an 
hour or more ; and the sense of speed made up with 
them for the realities of time and of coordinated 
distance wherein they were incompetent indeed. 

Nor was that error, that growing error in exacti- 
tude, all that they had to face. 

THE PURSUIT 

It was perhaps eight o'clock in Paris, at the most 
half an hour later, that the whole populace was 
alive to what had happened. The drimis were beat- 
ing, rallying the militia, the crowd was filling the 
square in front of the palace. At that moment 
when strong action in pursuit of the fugitives could 
not be long delayed, they were only just upon this 
upland road leaving the Marne ; they had a start of, 
say, forty-five miles, fifty at the most, before the 
first rider could surely mount and be galloping in 
pursuit. The carriage rolled on fairly with Valory, 
its outrider, on before, Maiden trotting at the 
door, and the chaise with the queen's two waiting- 
women in a cloud of dust behind. It rolled on 
eastward through that high, little-known land of 

83 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

wide, hedgeless fields ; it was about ten o'clock when 
it came down into a sort of shallow cup lower than 
the plain, wherein lies that little place called "Old 
Houses" — Viels-Maisons. Very few men, I think, 
of those who travel or speak of their travels know 
the tiny group of roofs. It has not thirty families 
round its church, it meant to the travelers nothing 
but an insignificant posting-house and a relay; but 
it was there that their fate first touched them, for 
there a chance postilion, one called Picard, glanced 
at the faces, and knew them for the king and queen. 

Like so many upon that full and dreadful day, 
he yielded entirely to caution. The king was still 
the king. There was divided authority in France, 
and whether reward or punishment would follow 
any act no man could tell on such a day as this until 
it was known which of the two combatants, the 
crown or the parliament, would rule at last. So 
Picard said nothing; but he had seen. Others also 
were to prove discreet, but a little less discreet than 
he. 

The coach went on through the lonely land, past 
one small town, Montmirail, which later Napoleon's 
resistance was to render famous, and on again into 

84! 



THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 

the empty fields, still eastward. It grew to be 
noon, hot and ahnost stormy under the lowering 
sky. Louis the King, with his road-book spread 
upon his knee, followed with curiously detached in- 
terest the correspondence of the map with the dull 
landscape outside. As the carriage stopped at one 
posting-house after another, and as he would 
plunge his hand into his leather money-bag to give 
his guardsman the wages of the postilions, he was 
not content thus to show his face at the window, he 
would even stretch his legs a bit and get down from 
the carriage to pace to and fro while each fresh 
team was harnessing. 

"We are safe now," he said; and again, "There 
is no fear of our being recognized now." All the 
air of that little company had come to be one of se- 
curity, though one man had already marked them 
down, and already the galloping out in pursuit 
from the gates of Paris had begun. 

The governess and the royal children caught that 
air of security, and where a long hill put the horses 
at a walk, they got out and climbed it on foot. 
There was only one small incident of which to this 
day we cannot tell whether it was of any moment 

85 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

or not. The little princess had noted it and had 
been disturbed. It was the presence of a traveler 
who for a time rode alone upon his horse behind 
them, walking when they walked, trotting when 
they trotted. It may have been no more than the 
coincidence that his way lay with theirs. Long be- 
fore Chalons he had turned off by a by-road and 
disappeared. 

There is, making a sort of western wall for the 
Champagne country, a very sharp and even range 
of hills running north and south. These are the 
escarpment of that plateau of which I have just 
spoken, and through which for many hours the 
coach had been traveling on. They end abruptly 
to the south, but just beyond the precipitous slope 
in which they terminate there stands across a nar- 
row, clean-cut valley one isolated hill called the 
Mont Aime; so that the gap is a sort of gate into 
the flat country below, which stretches eastward 
in a wide, rolling, chalky plain, the lower Cham- 
pagne, of which Chalons is the capital and center. 
Beyond that plain another low, sharp line of hills, 
the Forest of the Argonne, marks the very dis- 
tant horizon. 

86 



THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 

Through this gate, which is a landmark for miles 
throughout the plain, passes the road; and half an 
hour beyond, or a little more, where the road crosses 
the small water of the Soude, three or four houses 
round one posting-house, by name Chaintrix, break 
the monotony of the fields. The travelers reached 
it just in the sultriest part of the day. They had 
not greatly added to their error in time ; they were 
not much, if at all, behind the hour and a half of 
debt against fate which they had already suffered 
to accumulate when fate touched them again, but 
this time with a stronger gesture than when, four 
hours before, the postboy at Viels-lNIaisons had 
looked askance and known them for what they 
were. 

Here lived one Lagny with certain married and 
unmarried daughters, and with him, by just one 
coincidence, his son-in-law from miles away, Vallet 
by name, who for that one day was there. That 
son-in-law had been to Paris the year before for 
the Revolutionary feast upon the Champ-de-Mars. 
He had there stared at the king, and when the ber- 
lin stopped at his father-in-law's door, and while 
yet the relay was waiting, he recognized his sover- 

89 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

eign. Now it happened — so the doom of the king 
willed it — that all the small household, father and 
daughter and son-in-law, were Royalists of the old 
kind. They made obeisance openly; the king and 
the queen accepted that homage with delight, and 
at parting gave them gifts, which still remain in 
testimony to the truth of this tale. Vallet insisted 
upon driving them himself, — with what conse- 
quences we shall see, — and what was more, this 
spontaneous little scene of enthusiasm added by 
some few minutes again — perhaps a quarter, per- 
haps half an hour — to the delay. The royal chil- 
dren had gone in to rest a little from the heat and 
from their fatigue. When they came out and the 
coach started, the postmaster and his daughters 
openly acknowledged their hosts before the servants 
of the farm and the postboys around. 

Vallet himself rode upon the leaders — they 
whipped off before three — proud to be driving his 
king and filled with zeal. But his zeal was indis- 
creet. Twice he let the horses fall. Once his off 
wheel caught the parapet of a bridge. At least 
twice the traces broke, and time, now so heavily 

90 



THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 

against them, turned still more heavily against 
them in the necessity of finding ropes and of mend- 
ing. There must have been one more hour lost 
somewhere in that stage of the road. 

When somewhat after four o'clock the fugitives 
clattered into Chalons, the whole matter was public 
knowledge. Whether Vallet had spoken, or 
whether the news shouted across the fields had been 
carried by some galloper, or in whatever other way 
it spread, many knew it while the two carriages 
were halted for the next relay in the town. The 
little knot that gathered round the carriage knew 
what they were gazing at; the bolder among them 
murmured thanks that the king had escaped his 
enemies. The postmaster of Chalons knew it, the 
mayor knew it, and many others whose names have 
not been preserved, but whose attitudes and words 
have. None would take upon himself any respon- 
sibility in the great quarrel, and only one obscure 
threat reached their ears. An unknown man did 
say in a low voice one thing which has been re- 
corded: at least we have it at second hand, but at 
good second hand, that the travelers heard during 

91 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

a halt a passer-by cry to them that their plans had 
miscarried and that sooner or later they would be 
held. 

But this general recognition at Chalons dis- 
turbed them not at all. They were now not only 
secure in mind, as they had been for many hours, 
but also within touch of certain and physical se- 
curity. For at the very next relay, not two hours 
along the road, was not the first of those armed 
posts of escort waiting for them, to surround them, 
to form a rear-guard, which should forbid all pur- 
suit, to roll up further posts as the carriage still 
went eastward, and to form at last a whole body 
of cavalry, leading them on to the main army be- 
yond Varennes ? At that town, not fifty miles on, 
was the limit beyond which lay stationed in great 
numbers the army of Bouille, the general privy 
to the plot and ready to do all things for the king. 

Here, if we are to seize the last act of this dis- 
aster, we must have some pictm'c of the scene in 
which it was played. 

The lower Champagne, "The Champagne of the 
Dust," as the peasants call it, heaves in wide, low 
billows that barely disturb the vast sameness of its 

92 




'U^/^/r-f' . ^- y^ ^^y^r/t' ^r/c /^^'^^f^f^ir. 






y. .:....-. /:, ^.^^.,^'•. 



DKOUET, THE POSTMASTER AT VAKENNES 



THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 

flat until the Argonne, its limit and its wall, is 
reached to the east. With the Ai'gonne are great 
trees again, and lively waters, and the recovery of 
rich land. 

That countryside of the "Champagne Pouil- 
leuse" is strange ; it has remained for centuries thus 
empty to the sky, land often too poor for the plow, 
everywhere hungry and half deserted. The slug- 
gish streams that make their way slowly through 
its shallow depressions are milk-white with the 
worthless chalky soil, and though now too regular 
plantations of stunted pines diversify it, planted in 
the hope of reclamation, it is of its nature a country 
without trees, as almost without men. Small, scat- 
tered villages hold its few people, and again and 
again one comes to patches as great as a rich man's 
estate that are left untilled and have lost almost all 
feature save the records of past wars. For here 
has been a great battle-field for ages. Across its 
flat one may still trace the lines of the Roman mili- 
tary roads. Here the French have made their 
chief modern ranges for the training of their gun- 
ners. Here Attila was broken in his great defeat, 
and you may see his enormous oval camp still stand- 

95 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

ing, so large that it looks like the ruin of a town in 
the midst of the plain. Here also in the very next 
year that followed the flight of the king were to 
meet for the first time the armies of the Revolution 
and of Europe, and from these poor fields were to 
retreat the forces of the invasion, which did not re- 
turn until, after twenty -two years, the republic and 
Napoleon had transformed the world. 

Right across the sweep drives the great road 
from Chalons, twenty-five miles, till it strikes at 
Sainte-Menehould, a country town at the foot of 
the Argonne. Only two relays break this long 
day's stretch, Somme-Vesle and Orbeval, each an 
isolated farm and standing in one of those slightly 
depressed muddy-watered dips to which the road 
falls, and from which it as slightly rises again in its 
eastward progress across the plain. And there at 
Somme-Vesle, at the Chalons end of the stretch, 
barely ten miles away, should be the first cavalry 
awaiting them, Choiseul's troop. 

It was in the hours between half-past four and 
six that the berlin was passing through this stage. 
That hour and a half of debt to fate which the loy- 
alty of Lagny at Chaintrix had increased perhaps 

96 



THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 

to two, the avoidable accidents under Vallet's post- 
ing had stretched to nearly three. 

Young Choiseul, the duke, had come in to 
Sonune-Vesle. He had his orders to expect some- 
what after noon at the earliest, at the latest by 
three, the carriage which held his master and the 
queen. His exact time-table said one, and at one 
that carriage had not yet reached Chaintrix! The 
officer was mounted, and his troop of forty also — 
forty German mercenaries esteemed more trust- 
worthy in such a task than any troops of the nation. 
From one till two they still sat their horses, waiting 
in the road before the posting-house, with the width 
of the Champagne all about. A strange sight to 
see so considerable an escort thus gathered, waiting 
for they would not say what. But here again, so 
oddly fast did the news travel, one man knew. As 
the' afternoon wore on, and men sent riding up to 
the crest of the rise could see nothing coming up 
the road, the postmaster, as though to make con- 
versation, strolled up to one man in subordinate 
command and said, "It seems that the king is to 
pass this way." He Vv^as answered neither yes nor 
no. 

97 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

Peasants came in from the fields ; a little knot of 
men gathered; rmnors went about. In those days 
all the French had evil words for the foreign mer- 
cenaries in the army. Some of the more ignorant 
of the field-workers began whispering that they 
were a press-gang, that they had come to seize men 
for the service; the better instructed were far more 
suspicious of something far more probable. Three 
o'clock passed, and there began to be some pressure 
upon the mounted men. A few were hustled; the 
gathering of peasants grew. Beyond all essentials 
was it essential thus far from any support to avoid 
a rumor of the truth, or at least the spreading of 
it, and any conflict between his little line of Ger- 
mans and the gathering peasantry about. And in 
one of those agonies that soldiers always feel, 
whether the command be great or small, when syn- 
chrony fails and when they are waiting hopelessly 
for something that never comes, torn as soldiers al- 
ways are in such delays between two necessities, 
Choiseul, as the afternoon still drew on and the road 
for miles still showed quite empty, decided for the 
more immediate duty. A little longer, and his 
troop would have suffered assault, and the king, if 

98 



THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 

after such inexplicable delay he did come at all, 
would come to find a country-side beginning to rise 
and his chances ruined. 

But was the king coming? How often had not 
Choiseul been told of the perils, of the necessities, 
of the last moment, of the repeated postponements ! 
How well did he not know himself, he who had left 
Paris as a forerunner just before, and who had a 
good eye for the faults of the court! Hour after 
hour had passed ; the king could not be coming, and 
to linger longer with his little German troop was 
in any case to insure failure. He would ride away 
with his men across Ai'gonne and join the main 
body at Varennes. He would not further rouse the 
growing talk of the fields by swelling the contin- 
gents to the east with his own, and by showing more 
soldiers than need be along the road. He would 
cut across the plain and througli the woods. He 
rode away, and his men after him. 

As the horses drawing the berlin topped the 
slight rise which hides from that approach the post- 
ing-house of Somme-Vesle, and as the flat dip, with 
the steading and the long wall of the courtyard, 
appeared before the travelers, the king from the 

101 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

window, the guardsmen riding at the side, saw in 
one moment a sudden nothingness, which struck 
them as though the whole of their chances had 
turned. Lounging hefore the gate of the stables 
were the few hostlers and servants of the place. 
Of the soldiers in their blue and white, and of their 
mounts, not a sign. It was inexplicable, but it 
spoke loudly. And the emptiness of Champagne 
became in that unexpected shock far emptier than 
before. The travelers did not speak to one an- 
other; they did not even press the relay. For the 
first time that day a sense of dread was growing 
in them. They went on under the evening. 

For it was now already evening. The reddening 
sun broke for a moment through a rift in the west- 
ern clouds ; it shone u^^on tumbled, white fields, bare 
or with a meager harvest, and, upon its ridge to the 
left, on the mill which was to be lifted into such 
fame in fourteen months under the name of Valmy : 
they were crossing that battle-field. 

One more halt, one more relay under the faihng 
light, and the hoofs of the horses rang over the 
paving of Sainte-Menehould with the high woods 
of Argonne right before them. And as they came 

102 



THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 

through the evening street, with all the people out 
to enjoy the new coolness of the air, that town more 
than any other they had yet passed knew thor- 
oughly what was toward. 

Gossip of it had been passing in the inns for 
hours. The post of hussars there waiting had 
angered men, but liad been also too well explained, 
and their captain, as the coach waited for its horses, 
forgot the official secret and saluted when those 
within beckoned him to hear the news. Drouet, 
the son of the postmaster, himself now acting as 
postmaster of the place, sullenly ordered the har- 
nessing, looking ill-naturedly at the huge, yellow 
thing, with its heaped luggage and tarpaulin atop, 
and teUing his men in that hill country to spare the 
beasts. It was perhaps a close thing whether, amid 
the growing suspicion and anger of the place, one 
and then another and then a third passing the news, 
and all aflame against the foreign mercenaries set 
there for a guard, the coach would be allowed to 
start at all. 

But the same fear and doubt of consequences held 
them here at Sainte-Menehould as it had held the 
much smaller number who had gradually heard the 

103 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

truth far up the road hours before. And the trav- 
elers began their climb under the falling night up 
into Argonne. One more relay in the darkness at 
Clermont, where the road to Montmedy branched 
off from that to Metz, and they were upon the last 
stage to Varennes and to safety. 

But when they were gone, when they had thus 
been hardly allowed to go, the captain of the little 
troop of cavalry, sounding boots and saddles, lit the 
flame. The militia were summoned by drummers 
throughout the streets, the German soldiers, muti- 
nous with hunger after their long wait and sup- 
ported in their mutiny by the town folk, failed to 
obey. The town council met, arrested, and exam- 
ined the captain in command, and after one hour of 
increasing vehemence this decision was taken, which 
changed the story of France and of the world, 
"That the fugitives should be followed and de- 
tained." And the two men chosen for this task of 
life or death — for should they fail, it was certainly 
death upon the return of the armies — were Drouet, 
the young postmaster, and Guillaume, both ex- 
cavalrymen and both men knowing, as they had 

104 



THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 

need to know, the darkness of Argonne that night. 
Both were men of great courage. 

The odds against them were heavy. Of eighteen 
miles their quarry had a start of seven. Further, 
they thought, as did all to whom the plan had not 
been given, that the king's flight would be by the 
main Metz road. They knew nothing of his goal 
at Montmedy and of the turn-up toward Varennes 
which he would take at Clermont. They did not 
know that Varennes meant for him safety and for 
themselves immediate defeat. 

They rode furiously up the road, and as they 
neared Clermont, nine miles on, having found in 
all those nine miles no sign of lights before them, 
in the pass where the great woods come close on 
each side and through which the road, the railway, 
and the stream run side by side to-day, Drouet 
heard voices in the darkness. He knew them for 
his own servants. 

He learned in one breathless question and answer 
that the coach had turned off the Metz road after 
the relay down toward the north and Varennes. 
He had to decide in the thick darkness, and at once, 

107 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

between following by the highway and cutting 
through the woods. He had the soldier in him, and 
he decided. He would take the chance of the 
woods, though he had eleven miles to go, and only 
an hour to ride in. If he did merit anything of 
fate, he would come in ahead of his prey ; and if he 
failed, he failed. 

He took the steep bank up into the trees with 
Guillaume, and though the two men knew the 
woods well, it was miraculous that they could thus 
gallop through a clouded night, through paths 
which I, who have followed them in full day, found 
tortuous and confused and often overgrown. He 
came down with his companion into Varennes town 
by the lane that leads from the forest above. It 
was asleep save for one light where men were sit- 
ting drinking. The hour was just on eleven. 
They could not tell whether they had won or lost 
in that great race. But Drouet, full of immediate 
decision, roused here a house and there another, 
blocked the bridge that led eastward to the farther 
part of the town and out toward the army by drag- 
ging across it an empty wagon that lay by, and 

108 



THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 

then strode up the main street of the place to find 
whether he had lost or won. 

He came uj)on the berlin suddenly under an arch 
that spanned the way from house to house, the big 
thing almost filling the arch, and its two round 
lamps, with their reflectors, shining like great eyes. 
He heard some altercation, and shrill above the 
other voices one woman's urging the postilions. 
They would consent to go only a few yards farther, 
to cross the river. And there was Bouille's son and 
his men waiting for them. Drouet took the lead- 
er's reins and threw him back on his haunches. He 
had won the race. 

What followed was the anticlimax and the de- 
spair: the mayor, roused and hesitating; the hussars 
drifting in; Choiseul and the rest, now powerless 
before an immense armed mob that had gathered 
under the new day; the gallopers from Paris; the 
slow, dreadful return under the heat; and the 
restoration of the crown to the palace, which was 
henceforward its prison. 

109 



PART THREE 

THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES 



INTRODUCTION 

After the failure of the flight of the royal family, it 
was evident to all men of foresight that the European 
governments, and in particular the government of the em- 
pire at the head of which were the brother and afterward 
the nephew of Marie Antoinette, would attempt to restrain 
the Revolution by force of arms. It was not equally ap- 
parent that matters would come to actual war, for many 
erroneously thought that the French Avould yield to the 
threat of foreign intervention. At the head of those who 
were guilty of this capital error was Marie Antoinette her- 
self, who wrote to her brother in the autumn of that same 
year, 1791, suggesting that he should gather a large armed 
force upon the frontiers, and declaring that it should act 
as a menace and a police. She was thus principally re- 
sponsible for what followed. 

The winter passed with a false situation both within 
France and without. There was a desperate attempt to 
keep the king nominally in power, though all real authority 
had left him since his flight. This attempt was resisted 
by the mass of opinion, but was supported by nearly all 
the politicians, even the most radical. The foreign gov- 
ernments, meanwhile, grew more and more threatening, 
and Marie Antoinette kept up a secret correspondence 
with them. It became obvious as the spring of 1792 ap- 

113 



INTRODUCTION 

proached that if the foreign armies intervened, it would 
be not only to save the monarchy, but to crush the Revo- 
lution altogether. The queen betrayed French plans of 
war to the enemy. The emperor wrote a letter demanding 
certain things in his name that concerned French domestic 
politics alone. The result was that the French Revolu- 
tionary parliament made war in April, 1792. Prussia 
joined Austria in the coming campaign. 

Luckily for France, the foreign preparations were very 
slow ; the French forces were in a deplorable state, and the 
success of the foreign invaders hardly doubtful. Mean- 
while it was more and more publicly known that the court 
welcomed the war as a probable or perhaps certain deliver- 
ance of the royal family by foreign arms. The Palace of 
the Tuileries in Paris was thus a sort of fortress wherein 
the executive, — that is, the king and the queen at his side, 
— still wholly in command of the French armies in theory, 
and largely in command of them in practice, could direct 
operations adverse to the national welfare. 

The instinct of all the democratic leaders was in favor 
of taking the Tuileries by storm, as a foreign stronghold 
might be taken; but for this they had no forces save the 
militia, the regular forces near Paris being in the hands of 
the king. The turning of the scale was due to the arrival 
in Paris of armed bands from the provinces, chief among 
which were the companies from Marseilles. These, with 
the aid of the Parisian militia and the incompetence of the 
court, managed to storm the Tuileries upon the tenth of 
August, 1792, and thus put an end to the French mon- 
archy. 

114 



PART THREE 

THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES 

UPON Sunday, the twenty-ninth of July, 
1792, in the late morning of that day, the 
broad road that flanks the River Seine above Paris 
was covered by a marching column of men. They 
were in number about five hundred. A few showed 
uniforms grotesque with dust and grease. The 
most part were in the clothes of their civil estate, 
a few workmen, many of the professions, not a few 
from the land. For the most part they went gaily 
enough, though without parade; but some were 
very weary, and a few halting pitiably, though all 
trudged on. 

This column was that of "the men of Marseilles," 
and their tatters and their fatigue were the usury 
of five hundred miles of blazing road. They had 
been one month so marching, and behind them they 
still dragged two cannon — dragged them by leather 
lanyards, taking turns. 

115 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

This last day of their famous raid was hot and 
cloudless. The sight of the river alone was cool, 
past the stubble of the baked harvested field; and 
the great road stretched on dusty hour after hour 
and league after league. 

They had halted for the midday meal ; the after- 
noon was already mellowing when they saw at last, 
far off in the north and west, the twin towers of the 
cathedral, the lifted dome of the university church 
upon the height to the left, the windmills upon 
Montmartre to the right, and between those low 
and distant hills the haze of Paris. 

They formed somewhat before they reached the 
suburbs; they took some kind of rank, that their 
approach might be the more significant, and that 
they might hold their companies in the press of the 
poor from the eastern quarters that had come out 
in crowds to meet them under the sunset. They 
raised their famous song; they came in through the 
first houses to the noise of "La Marseillaise." 

Before them other contingents, less famous, had 
reached the city for the Revolutionary feast. 
These had found the whole town ahve with prepa- 
ration for the struggle; for the war had now run 

116 



THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES 

four months, or nearly four, and it was certain that 
the crown was betraying the people. 

Upon the morrow this battalion from Marseilles 
came into the town through St. Anthony's Gate, 
through the main way dense with people, past the 
last foundation ruins of the Bastille. Their drums 
beat. They carried their colors before them. 
Their cannon, now cleaned and burnished, followed 
in their train. 

In the center of Paris there stands, the most 
famous, perhaps, among the royal emblems of Eu- 
rope, a gi'eat palace the construction of which is of 
every age, though its outward aspect is singularly 
united. It is the Louvre. This great place, more 
than a third of a mile in length, is in plan two court- 
yards. The larger of these, as large as a little 
town, and called the Carrousel, at the time of the 
Revolution was completed only upon one of its 
branches, and was closed toward the west by the 
mass of the Tuileries. Its one completed side was 
the southern one, that toward the river, called "the 
Long Gallery." From the end of this the Tuile- 
ries turned away from the river at right angles. 

119 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

For more than forty years the charred walls of that 
building, burned in the Commune, have disap- 
peared, and their place is taken now by an open 
garden. Only the two high, flanking pavilions 
which closed the north and the south of its long line 
still stand, each now forming one end of the com- 
pleted great courtyard of the Louvre. 

In 1792 the Tuileries had upon the Carrousel 
side, toward the palace of the Louvre, three smaller 
yards, walled and preserving its entrances from the 
public of the city. Beyond these again, and filling 
all the main Carrousel court of the Louvre, was a 
crowd of houses pierced by tortuous lanes, and in 
the midst of them a little chapel to St. Thomas of 
Canterbury. This mass of houses within the arms 
of the palace was, as it were, a little overflow of the 
town into the midst of the Louvre and its connected 
Tuileries. Through this built and crowded space 
traffic passed and repassed between the rue St. 
Honore, to the north of the Louvre, and the river, 
running along its southern side. For under the 
Long Gallery of the Louvre, the only completed 
side of the great Carrousel court, arches were 
pierced, giving access to the quays. 

120 



THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES 

Behind the Tuileries to the west the gardens, 
which are now open to the town, and a part of it, 
were then private to the king. Overlooking them 
from the north, the great oval of the royal riding- 
school looked with its tall, mournful windows, and 
therein, upon benches roughly provided for the 
passing circumstance, sat the congress of the Revo- 
lution. Therein were heard the declamations that 
hurried on the storm, and in these hot days, when 
the western casements of the palace stood open at 
morning, the court within could hear the distant 
noise of the debates. 

That court, with the heavy, lethargic king in the 
midst of it, still governed in this end of July, 1792. 
He was still the executive ; from him and from those 
rooms there still proceeded all orders to the armies, 
all communications with the powers of Europe. 
A great pomp still surrounded these last hours of 
the French monarchy. Its ceremonial was still ex- 
actly preserved amid the gold, the heavy hangings, 
and all the splendor of the Bourbons. So long as 
that center stood and governed, so long as it be- 
trayed (for it was certainly betraying) the nation 
in arms, that nation and the great experiment upon 

123 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

which it had embarked were in peril or doomed. 
For from the Tuileries could go out not only open 
orders that presumed the defense of the frontiers 
and resistance to the coming invasion, but secret 
letters also, very contradictory of these; and one 
such had gone in those very days in menace of the 
French people. The queen's letter was an appeal 
for proclamation to be issued by the invaders, a 
manifesto threatening with military execution what- 
ever men or cities might either arrest the foreign 
armies or insult the shaken and tottering throne of 
her husband. 

The Tuileries, then, thus standing in the midst 
of Paris, and of Paris armed in militia bodies, swol- 
len with these Revolutionary volunteers from the 
provinces, was morally a sort of fortress, isolated 
and held, standing for the enemy in the very heart 
of the national capital. It must hold out till the 
invader came, or, if it fell, carry with it the crown. 

The Tuileries was not only morally a fortress ; it 
was in some measure an effective fortress as well. 
A regular force, the royal guard of Swiss mer- 
cenaries, was available for its defense; it had can- 
non, and save against cannon the great building 

124 



THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES 

was strong; it expected and received drafts of vol- 
unteers of its own that would support the king and 
could be armed; it possessed good reserves of am- 
munition; a minority, but a considerable minority, 
of the wealthier militia in the city, promised a rein- 
forcement. It would have a garrison of some six 
thousand men if an assault came. 

The very position of the palace strongly aided 
its defense. The garden behind was well pro- 
tected; no street flanked it, as the rue de Rivoli 
does to-day, but all along the north were houses, 
the narrow passages through which could easily be 
held. Upon the south it reposed upon the river, 
with only the quays between. 

If the place was to be taken at all, it could be 
taken only from the east, the Louvre side ; and not 
from there, it would seem, against any sustained 
musket-fire from the windows, still less against 
cannon stationed in the three walled inclosures that 
stood out before it toward the great courtyard of 
the Carrousel. 

The sultry days with which that August opened 
were days of a curious hesitation. The invaders, 

125 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

massed under the Duke of Brunswick, beyond the 
German frontiers, were in column, marching up the 
Moselle Valley. They had not yet crossed those 
borders. The secret messages to the enemy, the 
negotiations between them and the treasonable 
crown, were still proceeding. The armed militia 
of Paris, or that majority of it which was ready to 
act for the Revolution and against the king, drilled, 
but did not yet move. There was a silence, as it 
were, or at the most a murmur, throughout the mil- 
lion populace and over all the plain that holds 
Paris. Quarrels arose, indeed, violent enough, and 
blows were exchanged, especially where the volun- 
teer contingents from the provinces were feasted. 
Already by that end of July the news of what the 
invaders intended was abroad. Their proclama- 
tion, which the queen had inspired, was on all men's 
lips, copies of it, printed, had come in from the 
frontiers. It still suited the crown to pretend that 
it had not heard of that insult which it had itself 
drafted. 

By the third of August the pretense could be 
kept up no longer, and on that day the king com- 
municated to the congress in the riding-school, to 

126 



W''^ 




I "iAIh t- 



THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES 

the National Assembly, the amazing terms of the 
challenge. If the French would not undo all their 
Revolutionary work, if they met the invasion of the 
country by resistance, if they menaced the person 
of the court and in particular the king and his fam- 
ily, all so acting were punishable by death, in par- 
ticular all public officers and magistrates that 
should so attempt to defend the cause of the nation. 
As for Paris, if it moved, Paris was to be destroyed. 

There is a temper in the French by which every- 
thing is restrained in them until they act. It is a 
temper of rapid accumulation before the moment of 
decision. During the week that followed, this tem- 
per was discoverable throughout the city, very sig- 
nificant to certain captains of the people and in 
particular to Danton; very much misunderstood by 
foreigners who have left us their records, and by 
not a few of the court and of the wealthier quarters 
of the town. 

As though each party to this coming and decisive 
grappling was instinctively aware of some known 
trysting-day, the week proceeded under its increas- 
ing heat with orders upon each side, with the serving 
out of ball-cartridge, with the rations of powder for 

129 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

the same, with the sending of directions where men 
should gather, and where defense should be posted. 
Neither side yet moved; neither side was strong 
enough to prevent the preparations of the other. 
There was violent thunder, but the air was not 
cleared. The oppression of the sky still grew 
heavier as the moment of crisis drew near. 

I have said that it was upon the third of August 
that the king had admitted to the assembly the 
manifesto of Brmiswick which heralded the inva- 
sion. That day was a Friday. Exactly seven 
days separated it from the crash. Upon Sunday, 
the fifth, when the last royal mass was said publicly 
in the chapel of the Tuileries, whispers and open 
words among the public in the galleries were the 
last expressions of civil and unarmed resistance 
that the court was to hear. By Tuesday, the sev- 
enth, every man who was to support the crown had 
received his orders. Upon Wednesday the Swiss 
Guards, in their barracks to the west of the town, 
had the command to march upon the morrow, and 
on Thursday, the ninth, at evening they came 
marching in, no man opposing them, while during 
that same evening all those of the wealthier militia, 

130 



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g- 2 




THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES 

or of private gentry, or of old servitors, that would 
garrison the palace and defend the crown, passed 
in through its doors. 

Before night the court heard the hammering and 
the sawing of the carpenters in the Long Gallery 
of the Louvre. They were making a gap there in 
the flooring, lest the Tuileries should be turned 
from that end. With the fall of darkness they 
could also hear the rumbling wheels of cannon 
going to their posts and of wagons still distributing 
the arms and the munitions for the fight. 

The night fell very dark and moonless, but open, 
in the stifling weather, to murky stars. From the 
higher windows of the Tuileries one could see in 
nearly all the houses around lights maintained at 
the windows of the citizens, for that night few slept. 
Amid so much terror and surmise, there was a gro- 
tesque suggestion of a city illuminated as for a 
gala-day. 

Garrisoned within the palace there stood to arms 
squads of the volunteers along the first row of its 
eastern windows; the Swiss Guards were stationed 
with piled muskets in the three courts before it, and 
in the central hall up which the great marble stair- 

133 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

way turned. The hours of the night went by. 
Midnight was passed, but nothing stirred. 

It was a Httle before one o'clock when this gen- 
eral silence was shattered by one loud cannon-shot 
close at hand. For a moment it was thought that 
the popular forces were moving. It was not so. 
That cannon-shot was only a signal for the bells. 

The bells began to ring in steeple after steeple, 
dome after dome, catching the call one from an- 
other athwart the dark town. First on the hill of 
the university ; then by St. Anthony's Gate, where 
was the thickest of the Revolutionary gatherings; 
then, nearer, by the town hall ; then from St. Mar- 
tin's to the north; from the millennial rough tower 
of St. Germain to the south. For an hour or more 
the clamor of the bells filled Paris. But still there 
was no marching or any sound of arms, and from 
those high windows of the roof in the Tuileries, those 
attic windows where the watchers were, the streets 
lay empty below, under the dim oil-lamps that 
swung from cords across them and from the 
brighter light of the unsleeping houses. 

From one of those same windows the queen, with 
certain of her women, watched through those hours 

134 




MARIE-ANTOIXETTE AND HER CHILDREN 

From a photograph by Braun, Clement & Co., New York, of a painting by Mme. 

Vigee Lebrun, in Museum of Versailles 



THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES 

of darkness. The stars began to pale, and along 
the uncertain east a band of dark cloud stood mo- 
tionless in the somber sky, like a distant coast re- 
vealed by the dawn. Behind it at last the vivid 
color of a thunderous sunrise showed. The violent 
red overspread all the arch above them, and so 
touched the roofs of Paris that it seemed as though 
a great fire had come at last with the wars and had 
caught all the city. Marie Antoinette called her 
sister-in-law, the Princess Elizabeth, to her side, 
and the two women watched this thing together. 
It was a little past four o'clock. The day broad- 
ened, and at last the sun rose blinding, and still the 
silence endured. The bells had long ceased, and 
the more careless of those within the Tuileries 
jested one with another, saying, "The tocsin did 
not yield this night; it has run dry." 

Before the sun had strength, and while yet the 
Tuileries cast a broad shadow westward over the 
garden terrace and toward the garden trees, while 
the streets were as yet still empty, the queen un- 
wisely bethought her that something might be done 
at this last moment to lend strength and dignity to 
the resistance of the palace. She would summon 

137 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

the king and bring the garrison out before him, so 
moving their loyalty and his too slow determina- 
tion. 

She went to find her husband. He had sunk 
into a torpor with the last houi's of the night, and 
when she woke him from the place where he lay 
he started up disheveled and confused. His 
clothes suffered through the wearing of so many 
hours ; his very wig was disturbed and askew. His 
face was suffused. But he came down at her ask- 
ing, and stood before the main western garden door, 
while what could be gathered of the six thousand 
were hurriedly summoned there into line to meet 
him and to be passed in review. Not all of them 
came, — not all of them by very many, — and the 
thing was so haphazard that unarmed pages slipped 
into the line and played the fool, with chance irons 
to take the place of muskets when they saluted. 
The king, a figure not exciting loyalty on that 
breakfastless morning after that sleepless night, 
heavy in shoulder as in stomach, pm'ple-coated, 
freckled and pale, walked up and down the motley 
line. It was an unhappy business, unworthy, un- 
dignified, the true product of an energetic woman's 

138 



THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES 

misunderstanding of men. Just before the king 
turned to leave them, an old and devoted courtier 
went down on one rheumatic knee to offer his sword. 
There was a single laugh from somewhere. Louis 
turned and reentered the palace. 

By this time the Friday sun had risen high. It 
was between six and seven o'clock, and still the citj'^ 
did not move. 

But there came to the queen — for it was she who 
was the soul of that defense — news full of omen. 
The regular government of the city, elective, popu- 
lar, and resistant to the crown though it was, had 
not seemed strong enough for battle: it had fallen 
in the night, and in the town hall there were now in 
power men of some insurrectionary committee, the 
leaders of the revolt. The man chiefly responsible 
for the militia of the city, one who might have di- 
vided or checked its forces by his authority, had left 
the palace in the night to meet the authorities of 
the citj^ When he reached the town hall he had 
found there not the authorities of the city, but this 
new insurrectionary body, and as he left the place 
the mob without had murdered hun. It was cer- 
tain now that the attack could not be restrained. 

139 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

Before the eastern front of the palace, cutting 
the great courtyard of the Louvre and shutting off 
the houses in it from the Tuileries, ran a high 
wooden pahng, stretching from one lodge gate to 
another. Between that paling and the Tuileries 
itself detachments of the guard were waiting with 
muskets loaded, and sections of cannon with 
matches lit, prepared to discharge at the first 
menace of attack. 

It was about eight o'clock when the head of a 
street boy who had hoisted himself up precariously 
from the farther side appeared above that paling's 
rim and disappeared again. Then one face, then 
another, as grotesquely, as impotently showed. 
Some stayed so long that it seemed as though their 
owners were standing upon the shoulders of com- 
panions. One or two of these larrikins threw 
stones. A guard leveled his musket, and all those 
faces popped down again. What a beginning for 
the catastrophe of a thousand years! 

At an upper window of the palace Louis, the 
king, watched, looking eastward in his turn, and he 
and those about him heard a murmur coming from 
along the river quay — a murmur not loud, but 

140 



3 X 




THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES 

wide-spread and deep and dull because there stood 
between it and the hearers the Long Gallery of the 
Louvre. It was the advance of the people, of their 
unformed vanguard, coming before the militia and 
the volunteers. In a moment that murmur turned 
to vivid, immediate, and neighboring sound, like the 
roar of water which has been heard approaching in 
a flume up a mountain-side and breaks suddenly 
outward from its issue over the washers: so the 
many thousands of the insurrectionary crowd burst 
through the arches under the Long Gallery, com- 
ing from the river quays into the Carrousel of the 
Louvre. 

Every musket and every window was ready; all 
the fourteen guns of the palace were ready in rank 
before it. The great oaken gates of the palisade 
were burst asunder; the armed mob broke through, 
swelling in ; and at that moment the first order was 
given in the palace to fire. 

Instantly the signal rolled along the line, and 
all the windows blazed with flame. Range in those 
days was very short, windage very great, and few 
fell; but the assault was checked, and as it halted, 
two guns of the Swiss roared out together, and the 

143 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

grape-shot swept down perhaps thirty men, opened 
a lane in the dark and shouting mass, and sent it 
pressing backward through the gates and the now 
opened rents in the paHsade. 

The Swiss, both those already before the palace 
and those coming out from within, formed by com- 
panies and charged. There were the shrieks and 
the trampling of a herd overcome by discipline, — 
the Swiss were perhaps a thousand all told, — and 
the whole place was cleared : the narrow and tortu- 
ous streets between the houses of the great Car- 
rousel of the Louvre ; and even, some say, the arches 
under the Long Gallery and the quays for some 
yards beyond. 

It was not yet nine o'clock, and the palace seemed 
to be already saved. 

There is no other town in Europe, and only two 
other peoples, the Irish and the Poles, of whom one 
could not say what many said in that moment of 
the town of Paris and of the French people, that 
their fate had been decided by this action of regU' 
lars against a mob. But Paris being Paris, and 
Gaul Gaul, and the French people having beyond 
any other the gift for rapid organization from be- 

144 



THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES 

low and for corporate discipline, nothing was yet 
decided. 

Even as the noise of the broken mob retreating 
died away, another new noise, more formidable, 
more regular, approached, and the watchers in the 
Tuileries heard it. It was not an army upon the 
march, but it was men determined and in some way 
ordered. It was the militia, it was the contingents 
from the provinces, and chief among them the vol- 
unteers from Marseilles, the five hundred with their 
guns. 

The Swiss were back, ranged before the palace 
and in reserve in the central hall and by the great 
staircase. All the muskets were loaded asain, 
though the affair was thought to be finished after 
that first brief and successful skirmish, when the 
sound of regular marching and the rumble of can- 
non-wheels were heard. 

At his window, overlooking the still empty in- 
closures beneath him, stood Louis, heavy with 
insuflicient sleep ; by his side stood an official of the 
department, Roederer. The column of the attack 
came swinging through the arches which led from 
the river quay under the Long Gallery; their can- 

145 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

non were ready, and their muskets charged. This 
time it was war. 

While each armed body facing the other held its 
fire, awaiting the advantage gained by such reserve, 
— for in those days of short range, to let a trained 
troop opposing one fire first was to have a heavy 
advantage in the returning fire at close quarters, 
— Westermann, an Alsatian, Danton's friend, 
mounted upon a horse, rode out from the popular 
ranks to parley in their own tongue with these 
Swiss mercenaries, German in speech, like himself. 
One fired, I think, — so the best story goes, — and 
immediately a rapidly increasing, alternative rattle 
of individual shots broke out from the line of the 
windows, above from the militia and the volunteers 
below; and unexpectedly, the ranks opening to let 
them through, the two cannon from Marseilles gave 
tongue against the cannon of the guards. This 
time there was no breaking, and the more trained 
firing of the militia and the provincial volunteers 
permitted of no further charge from the guards. 
But the reciprocal attack began to fill the space 
before the palace with fallen men, neither side yet 

146 



THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES 

proclaiming an advantage. The Swiss Guards 
still held the main door of the Tuileries; the fire 
from its long tiers of windows was still well nour- 
ished; the muskets in the hands of the half -trained 
populace were still regularly recharged, and held 
their own. 

It was in this moment of doubt that Roederer, 
the politician who stood by the king at his eastern 
window, said to Louis that it was the duty of a mon- 
arch not to risk the state. "Look, Sire ! A whole 
people are advancing! If the palace must fall, let 
it fall; but let the crown be saved." Louis looked 
dully out of that window, and thence he could see 
the Paris of the kings. 

This place stretched back beyond the origins of 
religion into the roots of Rome; thirteen full hun- 
dred years of monarchy had sat therein. The huge 
pile of the Louvre, stretching out into the morning, 
was the story of Henry IV, of the Medicean woman 
before him, and of the Valois. The turrets upon 
the more distant island were the walls of St. Louis. 
Eudes, the son of Robert, the founder of all the 
royal line, had beaten the barbarian off just where 

149 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

the slate pinnacles of the Chatelet pierced the sky 
half a mile away. Behind all these visible things 
were the ghosts of Clovis and of Charlemagne. 

He turned to go. He went back through the 
palace to the western gardens, where the sound of 
the firing upon the eastern front was deadened by 
the mass of the palace between. His wife and his 
children were with him, and a few men of the guard. 
He crossed between the regular trees, his little boy, 
his heir, kicking the fallen leaves before him with 
his foot, and entering the riding-school, Louis took 
refuge with the parliament. 

There stood that day upon the quays outside the 
southern end of the Tuileries a young man, a young 
man of twenty-three, a lieutenant of guns. Na- 
poleon Bonaparte, on leave in Paris. He was 
alone. He had watched all that business curiously, 
a spectator. He had already some knowledge of 
what the soul is in men fighting. He has left his 
judgment upon record that had Louis not turned 
back that day "to save the monarchy," the mon- 
archy would have been saved. He believed, and 
his judgment of arms is not negligible, that if the 

150 



THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES 

king had shown hmiself even then in the open 
spaces before the palace and in danger, preferably 
upon a horse, that would have happened to the de- 
fense which would have saved it. 

It was in the Long Gallery of the Louvre, where 
that arm of building joins the Tuileries, the weak 
point of the defense had been discovered. The 
young men of the populace, eager and curious, had 
flowed up the stairways of the Long Gallery and 
had found the flooring cut and a gap between them 
and the entry to the Tuileries. That gap they had 
fought for, conquered, leaped, and bridged with 
planks; and just as the defense of the palace 
against the frontal attack was holding its last des- 
perate own before the great main portal, just as 
the Swiss themselves were wondering how long the 
pressure they suffered could be resisted, the upper 
floor of the Tuileries was enfiladed: the first con- 
tingents from the Long Gallery were beginning to 
shoot down and through those suites of rooms; the 
garrison was caught in flank and wavered. 

Hervilly, an officer commanding the Swiss 
Guards, in that desperate moment received half a 
sheet of paper folded in four. The curious may 

151 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

peer at it to-day under glass in the Carnavalet in 
Paris. It was an order from the king to bid the 
guards cease fire and march out of the palace back 
to their barracks to the west of the town. That 
order had been sent from the place where Louis 
was in refuge, from the parliament in the riding- 
school. Hervilly read it. He put it in his pocket 
again. He still maintained the fire of the guards. 

But it was too late. The Tuileries were pierced 
from the south: those that had found the entry by 
the Long Gallery called to others behind them; 
room after room was swept; hundred after hun- 
dred of the armed populace pressed through the 
gap, killing and cleaning out the defense. 

As the fire from the palace windows was thus 
quenched, the attack from the open against the 
walls began to triumph; the main door was forced; 
the Swiss Guards were broken in the hall and upon 
the great marble staircase; their remnants were 
driven out backward through the western doors 
upon the Tuileries Gardens beyond. 

There was no battle any more. The last shots 
died away as one hunted refugee after another, dis- 
charging his last desperate cartridge, was run down 

15£ 




^-V;. ^t^d. 



THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES 

with the bayonet, and at last all that sound of men 
in arms ceased and gave place to the muffled tumult 
rolling in the rooms of the palace, a looting and a 
scuffling, a rumbling sound upon the many stairs. 

There chimed, heard through this new lull, the 
strokes of ten o'clock from the dial upon the garden 
front and from the church of St. Roch, hard by. 
In those two hours since eight all had been accom- 
j)lished. 



155 



PART FOUR 

UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY 




3 _ 



H^ 



td o 







INTRODUCTION 

While the popular forces were gathered in Paris for the 
assault on the palace, which eventually proved successful, 
the Prussian and Austrian army of invasion, under the 
command of the Duke of Brunswick, was marching against 
the French by the valley of the Moselle. It was accom- 
panied by many of the French nobles who had emigrated, 
and who desired by any methods, even those of foreign 
invasion, the destruction of the Revolutionary movement. 
The frontier was not crossed until some days after the 
palace had fallen, but the invasion was immediately suc- 
cessful. The frontier fortress of Verdun fell. The 
French forces were largely composed of unreliable volun- 
teers. The regulars themselves had been badly demoral- 
ized, and the French army under General Dumouriez, whose 
task it was to stop the invasion, lay upon the line of the 
Argonne, not a week's march from Paris, with very little 
hope of defending it successfully. But by one of the 
strangest accidents in history, when this army under Du- 
mouriez had been successfully turned by the invaders and 
was in its most desperate plight, an action fought near the 
village of Valmy changed the whole story of Europe. The 
result of this action, which was in a tactical sense indeci- 
sive, and in which the opposing forces never came to close 
quarters, was that the invading army was checked in its 

161 



INTRODUCTION 

career, was ultimately bound to retire, and the Revolution 
had just the time it required to raise and discipline new 
forces to resist further invasions, which were bound to fol- 
low. This action at Valmy, which, despite its indecisive 
tactical quality, was one of capital importance in the his- 
tory of the world, was fought almost coincidently with the 
declaration of the republic. On this same ground France 
and Germany to-day stand opposed. 



162 



PART FOUR 

UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY 

THERE is a country-side in western Europe 
upon which the fate of the world has twice 
been decided, the first time when Attila and his 
Asiatics were here broken by the forces of the 
Roman Empire ; the second when the French Revo- 
lution was saved in the action I am about to de- 
scribe. 

This country-side is known to the French, within 
whose territory it lies, as the Champagne Pouil- 
leuse. The Romans, from its capital, called it the 
Catalaunian Fields; for its capital is the town of 
Chalons upon the Marne. 

The plain is of a peculiar nature, difficult to be 
seized by those who have not known it, but, once 
perceived, a thing not easily forgotten, so distinc- 
tive is it and so much apart from all that bounds it. 
In formation the soil is chalky, but not of that chalk 
which bears the green swards of Sussex or Nor- 

163 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

mandy; not of that chalk over which the trout 
streams of Vexin or Hampshire run clear. It is a 
chalk kneaded, as it were, with clayey thickness, so 
that it bears only stunted trees or none, is sterile to 
the plow, and the waters which run sluggishly in 
the shallow dips of it are turbid, like milk and water 
mixed, and all their fords are muddy and difficult 
to pass. Those who drink of these waters and who 
live by them are few. It is an inhospitable land. 

For the shape of it, it is of an odd, rolling, con- 
fused sort, which, in describing it, I have often 
compared, and shall here compare again, to the 
slightly lifted waves of a sea, rounded, and heaving 
indiscriminately, where currents meet, a day after a 
gale. You will find no direction or set of up and 
down in these billows. Standing upon the summit 
of any one, others are seen around you as low, as 
smooth, as untenanted as that one from which you 
gaze, and between you and them lie broad and 
slight depressions a mile or two across, and hardly 
deep enough to hide the sparse villages of those 
plains. Such is the Champagne Pouilleuse. 

If a man stands upon any one of these slight rolls 
of hungry land, plowed desperately for insufficient 

164 




> J 



UXlFUliiiS OF THE AKMY UF FKEXCli FMiUKAXTS 



UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY 

harvest here and there, hedgeless, and ahnost fea- 
tureless, and looks directly eastward toward Ger- 
many and the roads by which invasions come, he 
will perceive, running black and distinct all along 
the horizon, a low ridge, even enough in outline. 
If the weather is clear, he may perceive it to be 
wooded. It stands no more than three hundred feet 
above the average level of the plain, but it bounds 
it absolutely. This ridge is the range of hills that, 
with its forest, is called "the Argonne." 

This ridge barring the main approach to Paris 
along the roads from the east, traversed in one steep 
pass by the main road which leads to Paris from the 
Germanics, Dumouriez held with his insufficient 
and patchwork forces, calling on Kellermann to 
bring up at all speed reinforcements from the 
south, and knowing well in his heart that even with 
those reinforcements he had not the quality of men 
who in the shock that was coming could withstand 
the famous discipline of the Prussians and the 
training of their Austrian allies. For Dumouriez, 
precise in temper, a soldier of the old strict armies, 
and one in very doubtful allegiance to the Revolu- 
tionary cause, justly doubting the temper of mere 

167 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

volunteers, and misjudging what the future might 
make even of such undisciplined men, thought, if 
anything, too little of the material, bad as it was, 
which he had to his hand. 

If the reader should wonder why a low ridge of 
this kind could prove an obstacle to the advance 
of armies, and should be thought even in so des- 
perate a case worthy of defense, the explanation is 
this : armies depend for their very lives, and equally 
for their offensive power, upon a train of vehicles 
and guns. They are tied to roads. And such a 
feature as the Argonne, low though it be, dense 
with wood and undergrowth, and built of deep, 
damp clay, was almost as effectual a barrier to in- 
vasion as might be an equally broad arm of water. 
The few roads across it, cut through the woods and 
hardened, in particular the great Paris road from 
Germany, which crossed it at the point called "les 
Islettes," were iike bridges or causeways over such 
an arm of water, and as necessary for the passage 
of any army as are bridges over water. To hold 
these passes, if it were possible, was all Dumouriez's 
plan. For Verdun had fallen in the first days of 
this month of September (1792), more than half 

168 



UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY 

of which had now run in this week when Dumouriez 
lay along the hillside with his men, every pass 
guarded, and awaiting the shock. 

That shock came in the form of direct assaults 
upon the roads across the hills, attempts to carry 
them with the high hand. These assaults at first 
failed. An enemy attempting thus to break some 
link in a chain of defense will make for the weakest. 
If Prussia and Austria were to cross the Argonne, 
it must be by that one of the four roads where the 
resistance was weakest. The direct road, the great 
Paris road, which was the southernmost of the four 
passages, they would not first attempt. They 
managed in their second effort to break the line at 
that point called "The Cross in the Woods," a day's 
march to the north. They lost- but few men in this 
success. They gained their gate ; Dumouriez's line 
was pierced. Hurriedly in the night he withdrew 
all those of his men who, lying to the north, would 
have been isolated had they waited for the dawn, 
and he fell back down the hills, standing now with 
his back to Germany, his face to Paris, and know- 
ing that his position was turned. For though the 
Paris road was still held, the enemy was pouring 

169 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

through the breach in the dike above, and the way 
to the capital was open for him round by that cir- 
cuitous road. 

All the weather of those few days had been 
drenching rain. The clay of the hills was sodden, 
the autumn leaves drifting upon it throughout the 
forest; the bare, rolling plains and the chalk were 
sodden with it, too. It was the nineteenth of Sep- 
tember, and Kellermann, just in time by a few 
hours, but with reinforcements that could hardly 
save his country, had effected his junction with his 
chief. So Dumouriez, with Kellermann now 
linked on to him to his left and to the south, stood 
with his back to the Ai-gonne and his face to Paris, 
waiting for inevitable catastrophe, while round by 
his right hand the enemy poured through into the 
open plain. 

There was present with those invading columns 
a man supremely gifted with the power both to 
observe and to express, a young man destined soon 
to bear one of the greatest of names. This was 
Goethe. For Goethe was with the German armies, 
and we have from him some account of what he 
saw. We can see through his eyes the bare, dull 

170 




GOETHE, AVHO "WAS WITH THE GERMAN ARMY AT VALMY 



UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY 

landscape, with low, misty clouds hurrying above 
it, now hiding all things in rain, now in an interval 
of drier weather showing a steaming reek coming 
up from the drenched fields ; and between those two 
flats of gray earth and gray sky the dark bodies of 
troops moving like ordered herds westward from 
the Argonne and the woods, on over the rolling of 
the open land. 

By this night of the nineteenth of September 
they had taken their full march and were drawn up 
with their backs to Paris, their faces to the Ar- 
gonne, over against the French lines. The invad- 
ers could not leave those forces of Dumouriez's 
behind them upon their communications. It was 
their task, now that the Ai-gonne was forced, to 
clear away by capture or by dispersal the aiTny that 
was still in existence, though doubtful, or, rather, 
only too certain of its fate. 

Now, this long way round by the northern gate 
in the hills, this lengthening of tortuous communi- 
cations, and the persistent rain of those days, made 
it imperative that the decision should be taken 
promptly. Dysentery had been present in the 
Prussian and Austrian forces for some time. In 

173 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

the abominable weather it had lately increased. 
Bread, which was almost their only ration (until 
they should come out into more favorable lands a 
day's march ahead upon the road to Paris), came 
up but tardily and clumsily by the long round of 
the muddy road. It was imperative that Du- 
mouriez and his checker-work hotchpotch of volun- 
teers, of mercenaries, of old regulars, officered at 
random, and even some only half-officered, should 
be swept from the communications if the invasion 
was to proceed; and therefore without repose, and 
with the army as it found itself after fighting 
through the Argonne and making the long march 
afterward, was to attack at once, with the first light 
of the next day, the twentieth. That day was to be 
decisive in the business of the modern world. For, 
by coincidences upon wliich men still debate, but 
which I think can be explained, and which I shall 
now present, the invaders failed in their easy task. 
Dumouriez's troops were left intact after the at- 
tempted action, and the armed reduction of the 
Revolution was postponed so long that it became 
at last impossible. 

After all those days of cold and deadly rain the 

174^ 



UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY 

dawn broke uncertainly through a dense mist that 
covered all the swellings and tumbled land. The 
extreme right of the invaders' line, the Prussian 
regiments with their king, reaching southward as 
far as the Paris road, was in the thick of it. North- 
ward it lay somewhat more loosely and thinly where 
the Austrians formed the left extremity. But 
everywhere it was too dense for any observation. 
Such scouting as was attempted groped painfully 
yard by yard in that confusion, and there was at 
first no wind at all, nor any lifting of the fog. 

It was some two hours after sunrise before the 
first break in this veil appeared, and that but a slight 
one. We have the relation from the pen of the 
man who saw it. He was out with a small patrol 
of cavalry, feeling and groping thus beyond the 
Paris road to discover what the French might be 
doing under the cover of such white nothingness, 
when a momentary air raised the veil for fifty yards 
or so, and he found himself point-blank against a 
battery of four guns, the French gunners standing 
idly by. Their position was such that, had the day 
been clear, they would have enfiladed the whole 
Prussian line. The young man set down in his 

175 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

diary this commonplace, of awful meaning to a man 
who had had one such glimpse in such a fog in such 
a morning: 

"Upon what threads of chance do not the fates 
of empires depend!" 

But this extreme battery of the French knew 
nothing of opportunity. The fog closed again im- 
mediately. The vague, mounted figures that the 
gunners had seen were swallowed up at once, and 
the effect of that strange encounter was to make 
the officer in command of the guns withdraw them, 
fearing that in his feeling through the mist on to 
that little height he had pushed his pieces too far. 
The Prussian patrol heard, though they now could 
not see even so few yards away, the hoofs of the 
horses sogging up with the limber, the clanking of 
the hooked guns, and the retirement across the 
moist stubble. They heard the swish of the wheels 
and occasional commands fainter and fainter, and 
then nothing. 

As the morning advanced, however, the wind 
which had carried the rain of all those days — a wind 
from the south and east — began to blow again, and 
drove the mist before it into very low, scurrying 

176 




l''.8Ll'??r01S C^SSRSS'JXJFallK JiCK](jXKll35^\IVN, 



J/' 



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/i;.yy, J>f^, r^',> Jia-rji/un 



MARSHAL FRANgOIS-CHRISTOPHE KELLERMANX, DUKE OF VALMY 



UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY 

clouds, so low that they covered the insignificant 
ridge of Ai-gonne and so low that the steeple of 
Sainte-Menehould, the Httle county town at the 
foot of the hills, disaj^peared into them. But those 
low clouds left the rolls of land in the plain itself 
free from their mist, and at last the armies could 
see each other; and this is what the Prussian hne 
drawn up upon the one ridge saw as it looked east- 
ward to the other. 

There was more than half a mile, but less than a 
mile, of very shallow, concave dip separating this 
swell, or crest, upon which the King of Prussia and 
his staff had drawn up their regiments and another 
similar swell, or crest, opposite where was the 
French left, the troops of Kellermann. 

This opposing crest beyond the very shallow and 
perfectly bare valley bore, standing in the midst of 
the French line, a windmill — a windmill famous 
now in the legends and songs of the French army, 
an object that has grown symbolic, and that you 
will find in all the legends and pictures of the battle. 
It was the Mill of Valmy. Indeed, Valmy village 
was close by, but hidden by the crest, for it lay upon 
the farther slope. 

179 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

The French line thus strung on each side of the 
mill upon the crest presented a contrast indeed to 
the strict rod-like files of the Prussian infantry that 
watched them from over the depression. Their 
loose order, their confusion, their lack of officers, 
their heterogeneous composition, their doubtful dis- 
cipline — all these in the soul of that army were 
externally expressed by something straggling and 
unsure. The very uniforms, so far as one could 
discern them at such a distance, were often groups 
grotesque, often ragged, and sometimes inter- 
spersed with dull, civilian clothes. A man, when 
he saw that sight, might have thought, perhaps, that 
he was watchmg a crowd stretched out for a spec- 
tacle rather than soldiers. But in one arm, by 
which the French have often conquered, and to 
which the greatest of their captains was later 
strongly attached, — I mean the guns, — something 
stricter prevailed, and forty were drawn up on the 
cusp of the crescent near the mill. 

For a mile or two, in various groups, northward 
of this position that Kellermann had taken up lay 
the French right under Dumouriez, and opposite 
him in turn were the Austrians. From the Prus- 

180 



UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY 

sian ridge, which I take for my point of view, since 
it was there, or rather in sight of it, that the issue 
was determined, uncertain portions of Dumouriez's 
command and certain Austrians could be discerned 
by peering up to the left and noting the furnishings 
of men upon certain points of higher ground. But 
the immediate business lay between those two lines, 
the one so strict, the other so loose, that faced each 
other upon each crest of that long, slow trough 
under Valmy Mill. 

The ground separating these two lines, the slight 
fall from the one, the level at the bottom, the slight 
rise to the other, demands particular notice. It 
was, as the reader will soon see, the whole matter 
upon which the fate of this cannonade, and there- 
fore of Europe, turned. Save in one place, where 
a few bushes and shallow, disused diggings for marl 
disturbed its even surface, it is for the most part 
plowland. At this date in the autumn, the twen- 
tieth of September, it is covered with stubble, and 
the short, stiff straws, cut close to the soil by the 
sickle, make it seem like the gi'ound of any other 
open field. No trickle of water runs through it 
even after rains. There is no appearance of 

181 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

swamp or marsh. One is not warned by rushes or 
other water growths of any difference between this 
field and any other field. So it dips and rises again 
for its half or three quarters of a mile of breadth 
and for its mile or so of length, almost everywhere 
under crop, and now under autumn stubble, save 
here and there where balks of measly grass have 
been left that show between their insufficient blades 
the dirty gray-white of that half-chalky soil. 

It was across such land, such to the eye at least, 
that the assault upon the French must be made 
after the advance had been properly prepared by 
artillery. 

And prepared it was. The Pinissian command- 
ers let loose so furious a cannonade as had not been 
heard by any living soldier of that day. Miles 
away in the pass of les Islettes, an Englishman, 
who by strange adventure was the brigadier-gen- 
eral, holding that position to protect the rear of the 
French against attack, a man who had been 
through the whole American war, a certain Gen- 
eral Money, of whose strange fate I have written 
elsewhere, marveled at the continuity and sustain- 
ment of all that fire. Distant Argonne shook with 

182 



UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY 

it, and the ground carried the thuds mile upon mile. 
They felt it in Sainte-Menehould like the shock of 
falling timber. 

But the range was long for the field-pieces of 
those days, and one's target at a thousand yards 
very uncertain. Many a missile flew over the 
heads of the motley French line, many fell short, 
and buried themselves in the wet bank' of the slope 
before it. The losses so inflicted by hour after 
hour of sustained battery-work were not great, nor 
did that loose line upon each side of the mill seem 
to fluctuate or waver, nor were the King of Prussia 
and his staff, or Brunswick, commanding all, over- 
certain when the apt time for the critical charge 
and the advance of their infantry would come. 

For to the Prussian guns the French gunners 
replied with a fire almost equally maintained and 
upon the whole of greater precision. They could 
not dominate the enemy's fire; they were, indeed, 
inferior to it, but they did not allow themselves to 
be dominated by it. It was the remark of all those 
who watched that field upon either side that the 
French forces in this one respect of the guns had 
powerfully surprised the invaders by their unex- 

185 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

pected efficiency. So the cannonade went on until 
men the least used to battle, the young recruits of 
Prussia, the young poet Goethe himself, looking, 
and noting curiously and a little sickly what "can- 
non fever" meant, were used to the roar and the 
blows of sound, and had come to make it a sort of 
background for their mind. 

It was at an hour that will never be precisely 
known, — so difficult is it to determine by evidence 
the phases even of a single action, but probably 
early in the afternoon, between one and two o'clock, 
— that all this tornado of sound was hugely over- 
borne by a crash and a thunder like no other. A 
lucky shot from the Prussian batteries fell into the 
midst of the French limbers, and in a sudden ex- 
plosion great masses of ammunition blew wheels, 
cases, horses, and men up in a sheaf of flame and 
in plumes of smoke close by Valmy Mill. There, 
in the very center of the French line, the command- 
ers, now watching eagerly through their glasses 
from the Prussian ridge, saw the beginning of a 
breakdown: a whole brigade was stampeding. It 
was, by a curious irony, a brigade of German mer- 
cenaries still retained in the French service. But 

186 



UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY 

as they broke, others also wavered ; the line was in 
desperate confusion, and might at any moment lose 
such formation as it had. 

This was the opportunity for the charge, and 
Brunswick sent forward one — slightly advanced, 
in front of and to the right of its neighbor, in the 
formation called echelon — the companies of the fa- 
mous Prussian line. They began their descent into 
the shallow valley — a slow descent, their boots 
clogged by pounds of the field mud; a perilous ad- 
vance, with their own guns firing over their heads 
across the valley, but an advance which, when it 
should be complete, the half-mile crossed, and the 
opposing slope taken at the charge, would descend 
to the business of the invasion, and would end the 
resistance of the Revolutionary armies. Against 
them as they went forward was now directed some 
part of the French artillery fire, such part as could 
be spared from the Prussian guns above. They 
halted often, they were often realined, but their 
slow progress was still working, ordered, and ex- 
actly maintained under that dramatic discipline 
which made in those days, as it does now, the appa- 
ratus, perhaps, of Prussian excellence and certainly 

187 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

of Prussian prestige. They reached the level be- 
tween the two lines; they touched the first rise of 
the opposing slope. 

Meanwhile Kellermann, upon his horse, when the 
French line had wavered upon the great explosion, 
rode suddenly along it, and with his feathered gen- 
eral's hat high upon the point of his sword, waving 
it, called loudly for cheers — cheers for the nation, 
which was the Revolutionary cry. The young 
men, emboldened, recovered some sort of forma- 
tion, and loudly responded with the cheers he had 
demanded ; the brigade that had broken was drawn 
up, put in reserve. The guns during that critical 
five minutes had behaved as though they had been 
veterans, nor had their fire diminished, nor had a 
gunner moved save just in that central point where 
the destruction of so much ammunition for a mo- 
ment checked the rapidity of fire. 

The French guns, then, contmually alive, turned 
more and more from the Prussian batteries to the 
infantry advancing against them up the slope. 
The Prussian guns, as their men came nearer to 
the French, had nearly to cease their fire or to di- 
verge it to the left and to the right. You could see 

188 



UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY 

along the French line the handling of the muskets 
and the preparing to meet by infantry fire the Prus- 
sian charge when it should come within its fifty or 
eighty yards. 

But to that distance it never came. For at this 
last phase of the battle, or, rather, of the cannon- 
ade, — it was no true battle, — there happened the 
wholly unexpected, the almost miraculous and, in 
the ej^es of many historians, the inexplicable thing. 
The Prussian companies in all their length, now 
within four hundred yards of the French line, 
thinned a little by French cannon fire, but quite 
unmoved and morally prepared for the advance, 
halted. Their progress, resumed, watched anx- 
iously by their commanders upon the height behind, 
grew slower and slower, was made in jerks, checked 
in a yard or two, finally stood still. There stand- 
ing, one would say, within touch of victory, suffer- 
ing with admirable obedience the steady loss under 
the French shot, and with admirable discipline clos- 
ing its ranks, this Prussian infantry was seen at last 
to fall back, to turn, and to retire. As slowly as 
they had come, in the same order, with the same 
absence of looseness anywhere, the files, suffering 

191 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

less and less with every yard of their retirement 
from the French batteries, came nearly to their an- 
cient stations, were drawn up just below the crest 
from which they had started somewhat over half 
an hour before. Valmy became again a cannonade 
and only a cannonade, but at the sight of this re- 
turning of their foes the French continually 
cheered, and the guns seemed to put on more vigor, 
and it almost seemed as though the numbers of the 
defenders grew. 

The afternoon wore on, the cannonade slackened 
toward evening, and it was one fitful shot and then 
another, and then none at last, and when darkness 
fell the two lines stood where they had stood in the 
morning. But the assault had failed. What had 
happened? Why had not the Prussian charge 
proceeded ? 

Now, to that question, which has produced many 
and strange answers, I think a true answer can be 
provided, and I shall attempt to provide it upon 
the authority of an observation made very closely 
and with the unique intention of understanding this 
unique affair in the history of arms. For when I 
went to make myself acquainted with Valmy field 

192 



UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY 

it was in the same season, in the same weather, after 
the same rains, in the same mists, and I believe that 
I have as much as any man hved in the circum- 
stances in which that issue was decided. I beheve, 
having myself gone over that depression from the 
Prussian ridge toward the French, in just that 
weather and after just those rains, that the advance 
was stopped by nothing more mysterious than 
marshy soil. 

History is empty of evidence, and we have noth- 
ing to learn. Upon the French side the retirement 
seemed inexplicable, and upon the Prussian the 
shame and failure of it seemed to have tied every 
man's tongue ; yet I believe it to be due to nothing 
more romantic than mud. Certain of our contem- 
poraries in modern history have said that Bruns- 
wick did not desire to press the action, but that his 
sympathy was with the Revolutionary forces. To 
talk like that is to misunderstand the whole psy- 
chology of soldiery; more, in such an action it is to 
misunderstand the whole psychology of men. 
Brunswick could not have recalled the charge with- 
out good cause on such a day and with such men 
about him as the King of Prussia, the emigrant 

193 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

princes and the commanders; but the thing is, on 
the face of it, absurd. A wiser guess, but made 
erroneously, ascribes the retirement to the persist- 
ence and effect of the French artillery-fire as the 
Prussian charge approached. This must certainly 
be rejected, for we know that the advance was 
steady, and the retirement too, and what is more, 
we know how comparatively small were the losses. 
It was not due to an officer losing his head, for 
the whole line retired without breaking and in con- 
sonance. It certainly was not due to any doubt as 
to the moral ability of the men to continue the 
ordeal that they had suffered so admirably over six 
hundred yards of ground and over perhaps a quar- 
ter of an hour of time. 

Those who will do as I did, and visit Valmy in 
the autumn, and after the rains, and walk by no 
path or any picking of one's way, but straight 
across the stubble, as the soldiers of those com- 
panies had to do, will, I am sure, decide as I here 
decide. For they will come to a belt not upon the 
bottom level, but at the beginning of the opposing 
slope, where, under the deceitful similarity of the 
unchanged stubble, and with nothing to mark the 

194< 




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GENERAL CH.VRLES-FRANQOIS DUMOURIEZ 
In Command of the French at Valmy 



UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY 

drowned state of the soil, that soil becomes virtually 
impassable, certainly impassable to men under fire. 
The French had before them, though they did not 
know it, a true obstacle, the unwitting attempt to 
cross which as though it were no obstacle lost the 
Prussians the battle, and with the battle lost the 
kings and the aristocracies of Europe their throw 
against the French democracy. 

Night fell, still misty, but unbroken by the sound 
of arms or of marching. With the next day, when 
the invaders counted their losses these, not over- 
heavy, they were appalled to find made far graver 
by a great increase of dysentery, which such a night 
in the open after such a day had produced. At the 
end of a week they fell back eastward again, fol- 
lowed and hampered by the French cavalry, and 
when they passed the boundaries of what was now 
the republic, a blank-shot fired from the walls of 
Longwy closed this great episode in the story of 
the Gauls. 



197 



PART FIVE 

THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI 




^isd^i^j • ■ _v^- 



'^'.. 



REPUBLICAN SOLDIERS IN THE KEVULUTIUN 



INTRODUCTION 

After the Battle of Valmy, the French armies, with the 
beginning of autumn, obtained quite unexpected and, as 
they were to prove, ephemeral successes. Dumouriez, a 
man of vast military ability, continued to command. The 
Republican armies poured over the Low Countries. Coin- 
cident with these successes, there came a period of high 
political excitement in Paris, and the rise of a sort of cru- 
sading spirit to spread the democratic principles through- 
out Europe and to transform society. It is to this more 
than to any other cause that we must ascribe the trial and 
execution of the king. There was, indeed, from the point 
of view of statesmanship alone, some excuse for the trial 
and fate of Louis. So long as he lived, he was necessarily 
a rallying-point round which all the counter-revolution 
would gather. The royal family having been kept in 
strict imprisonment, but not without some state and con- 
siderable luxury, in the tower of the Temple, a medieval 
building in the northeastern part of Paris, it was at first 
uncertain what would be done with them. The first steps 
in the affair took the form of an examination of the papers 
found in the palace and of a report on Louis's conduct. 
The accusations against the fallen king were formulated 
on the third of November. There were debates as to the 
legality of trying a former head of the state. The trial 

203 



INTRODUCTION 

was decreed exactly a month later. Louis was to plead 
at the bar of the Convention, — that is, the national con- 
gress, — which had met just before Valmy, and which had 
voted the republic. Long before his trial began, he was 
already separated from the rest of his family, who were 
given rooms above his own in the Temple. The indictment 
was framed by a committee, which reported on the tenth 
of December ; on the eleventh Louis appeared at the bar of 
the Convention. He had three advocates, the chief being 
the old and highly respected legist Malesherbes. The king 
appeared for the second time on the twenty-sixth of De- 
cember, and withdrew after the speeches for the defense 
had been made. His guilt was pronounced by the unani- 
mous vote of the Parliament, no one voting against, and 
only five abstaining. What followed I now describe. 



204 



PART FIVE 

THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI 

THE long trial at the bar of the Parliament 
was over. The pleas had been heard, and old 
JMalesherbes, weighty and with dignity at once of 
ancient law, of contempt for fate, and of complete 
self-control, had done all that could be done for the 
king. The verdict had been given. Louis was 
found guilty bj^ all of betraying the nation. He 
had called in the enemy. There remained to be 
decided by a further vote what his penalty should 
be. 

It was the evening of Wednesday, January 16, 
1793. The deputies of the nation were to vote, 
each publicly and by name, an enormous roll-call 
of hundreds of men ; each was to come up the steps 
to the tribune, to face the vast audience that 
stretched from left to right of the riding-school, and 
to pronounce clearly his decision. Each was free, 

205 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

if he chose, to add to his declaration the motives 
that had determined it. 

The three great chandehers that hung from the 
roof of the place were lit, affording a mellow, but 
insufficient, light in which the faces of the great 
throng, small dots of white on the black back- 
ground, were but ill distinguished. Upon the trib- 
une itself a brighter light was turned. 

The sun had long set ; the evening meal was over ; 
at eight o'clock the interminable procession began. 
They came on one by one, arranged in groups by 
their constituencies. They went up in turn the 
steps of the tribune from the right, voted in open 
voice, descended by the left. Among the first was 
Robespierre, because he was of those that sat for 
the capital. He made a speech (too long) to ex- 
plain what he was about to do. He protested that 
if the penalty of death was odious to him, and if 
he had combated it consistently as a general prin- 
ciple of law, yet did he now support it for this 
exceptional case. "I remain compassionate for the 
oppressed. I know nothing of that humanity 
which is forever sacrificing whole peoples and pro- 
tecting tyrants. ... I vote for death." 

206 




LAMOIGNON DE MALESHERBES, COUNSEL FOR THE KING AT HIS TRIAL 



THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI 
One after another the deputies for Paris, the ex- 
treme men, the men of the Mountain, mounted 
those few steps, faced the great silent body of their 
colleagues, while those who had just voted before 
them were quietly seeking their places again, and 
those who were about to vote stood lined up before 
the steps upon the farther side, and one after the 
other gave his voice for death. Each after so de- 
claring loudly his responsibihty, his verdict, and his 
name, confirmed the whole by the signing of a roll. 
The voice of Danton was heard, the harsh, but 
deep and strong, voice that was already the first in 
the country. He had sat all that day by the bed- 
side of his wife, who was to die. He had but just 
come back from the frontiers and from the army. 
His huge body was broken with fatigue; his soul 
was heavy with grief; his powerful brain was ach- 
ing from a lack of sleep. "I am no politician," he 
shouted; "I vote for death." 

So all night long the dreadful litany proceeded. 
Men left the hall to take an hour or two of sleep, 
a snatch of food; yet the hall seemed always full 
despite the coming and going of single figures, and 
through the long, cold darkness of that misty 

209 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

weather history heard voice after voice, weak, 
strong, ashamed, defiant, pitiful, muffled, out- 
spoken, bass, treble, old, and young, repeating at 
regular intervals: "Death absolute"; "Death with 
respite"; "Banisliment" ; "Imprisonment." And 
history saw, after each such speech or cry (for 
many spoke as well before they declared the doom) , 
an isolated man, high upon the tribune, beneath the 
candles, bending over the register and signing to 
what he had determined and proclaimed. 

The dull dawn of winter broke through a leaden 
sky. No eastern window received it. The tall, 
gaunt casements of the southern wall overlooking 
the Tuileries Gardens grew gradually into lighter 
oblongs of gray. The candles paled and were ex- 
tinguished. Hardly a third of the list was done. 
All that short January day (Thursday, the seven- 
teenth of January) the dreadful thing proceeded 
until darkness fell again, until once more the chan- 
deliers were lit. Once more it was night, and they 
were still voting, still declaring. 

At last, when more than twenty-four hours had 
passed, the business was over. No one was left to 
come forward to the tribune; and this great sleep- 

210 



THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI 
less mass, within which some few had noted one by 
one the voices as they fell, and had already calcu- 
lated the issue, waited for the counting of the votes 
and for the recounting. Not only by word of 
mouth, nor only by the signing of the register, had 
the precision of so awful an event been secured, but 
one by one the votes had been wi'itten down, folded, 
and sealed. The clerks of the Parliament opened 
each packet and arranged the sentences in rows, 
according to their tenor: for death absolute, for 
imprisonment, for delay. So one hour went past, 
and then another; but in the third, when it was per- 
haps ten o'clock, this silent process was interrupted, 
and the many that had fallen asleep, or were nod- 
ding half asleep after such a vigil, looked up 
surprised to hear that two letters had reached the 
assembly, one from some agent of the Bourbon 
king in Spain to demand a respite ; the other from 
the advocates of the king, who demanded to be 
heard once more before the chair should announce 
the result of the voting. 

All was interrupted; an immediate and passion- 
ate, though short, debate began. The intervention 
of the King of Spain the Convention would not 

211 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

consider; upon the proposal that the king's advo- 
cates should be heard once more a debate was al- 
lowed. Many members joined it, though in brief 
periods. Robespierre, among others, spoke in- 
tensely. He demanded that sentence should be 
read out and given before there could be any con- 
sideration of appeal. That opinion (not through 
him) prevailed, and the opening and arranging of 
the votes continued. A ceaseless little crackling of 
tearing papers, the whispered comments of men in 
groups, now and then some cry from the public in 
the galleries, broke the silence. 

It was not far from midnight when a further 
movement among the clerks at the table, a compari- 
son of sums, and heads bent together, scrutinizing 
the additions, prefaced the last scene of this act. 
The paper, with the figures written on it, was 
handed up to the chairman. That chairman was 
Vergniaud ; perhaps the noblest, certainly the most 
eloquent, of the Girondins. He rose in his place 
above them, holding that paper before him, and 
read out in the grave and even voice which had 
often moved their debates: 

"It is with profound sadness that I declare the 

2ia 



PROCLAMATION 



Di U 



CONSEIL EXECUTIF 

P R O V I so I R E. 



EXTRAJT des Regiflres du Confeil, dii 20 
Janvier 17^^, tan fecond de la Republique. 



Lf Ci.MKil eJ&uiif provifolrc dc-llWram fur 
ics mcfurc^ a prc-ndre pour Icxefiition du dt'Cret 
de U Conv.ntioi-. .ijtion.de. dc,% t j , .7. 1^ & 
10 Janvier 179J. arrt'tc Ics difpofitions fuivanlcs; 

i.* L'czccutioi) dn (ugcmenr de Louis Cspet 
fe fal dcmain Ijndi 2i- 

i." Lc iieu de Icxccuii.:..! (trj la P/^.v ,A- /,i 
Rhdulim , ci-dc»int ir7,;j .YT, cnirc le picd- 
d'fftal & Ics Clumps-tlyfccs. 

3.* Loois Capet partita da Tcmplt; a hiiit hcurt s 
du matin , Ac manicie <jne Tcxtcutian puifTc ctrc 
faitc a midi. 

4° Dcs Co«3mi0iirci du Dipartcmcm Jc Paris. 



des Comitiiilaircs de (a Muaitipaiit^.deux mciriWei 
du Thfiunai ciitnincl affiftcront a 1 cx^ulitw i Ic 
Secretaire - grciftcr de ce Ttibunai en drcficra le 
proccs - verbal . & Icfdif! Cnmmifliites & Meuibrcs 
du Tribunal, auilitot aprtis I'cxtfcution co«f«rani6c, 
vicndront en rendrc comptc au CtMilcil . letjucl 
rcftera en fcanc« pernmnei^tt: pendant toute ceoc 
journde. 

Le Confdl execulif provifi'irt. 

Roland. Clavieue, MONCE, Lebrvn, GArtAT, 

Pasciic. 

Par It Confeil , Grouvelle. 



A PARIS, DE L'IMPRIMERIE NATIO^iAI^E. EXECUTIVE DU LOUVRE. 17J1J. 



PROCLAMATION OF THE PROVISIONAL EXECUTIVE COUNCIL 



THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI 

penalty incurred by Louis Capet to be, by the vote 
of the majority of this assembly, that of death." 

Of seven hundred and twenty-one men who had 
voted, three hundred and ninety-seven had de- 
manded the scaffold, a majority of seventy-three. 

It was in complete silence that this memorable 
sentence fell. That silence was continued for some 
moments unbroken. The advocates of the king 
were now permitted to enter, for sentence had been 
formally delivered, and old Malesherbes, short, 
strong in figure for all his years, and now so far 
oblivious of his dignity and name as to be weeping, 
put forward his last plea. Sentence of death could 
not be given, by all the traditions of their law, un- 
less two thirds of the bench (for the French will 
have no single judges) concurred. And again, the 
prisoner had not had all those guaranties which a 
prisoner should have. And again, since it was as 
the head of the whole nation that he had acted, and 
since it was by the whole nation that he was con- 
ceived to be judged, then let the whole nation 
speak. He demanded an appeal to the French 
people. 

For a third time Robespierre spoke. He spoke 

215 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

with more emotion than his pecuHar academic style 
commonly permitted. Though he was in no way 
representative as yet of public feeling, though he 
was still a lesser man among those hundreds, for 
the third time his opinion coincided with that which 
was to prevail. He implored the assembly not to 
reopen the whole issue of civil war by putting this 
grave matter upon which they had fixedly decided 
to a general vote of millions. Not for the first time 
did this unalterable man betray for a moment his 
own unalterable creed. Later he was himself to 
perish in punishment divine of such deviations from 
the conscience of equality and of citizenship. 

Guadet — Guadet, the Girondin — spoke for the 
king in the legal matter. Merlin, a jurisconsult of 
some weight, replied. It was not true, he said, that 
by the traditions of the common law a majority of 
two thirds was required to confirm so grave a sen- 
tence in any tribunal. Upon points of fact, he 
urged, a majority not of two thirds, but more, — of 
ten out of twelve judges or assessors should deter- 
mine, — but for the penalty a bare majority — three 
votes out of five given from the bench — had always 
been held sufficient. The appeal of Louis was re- 

216 



THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI 

jected, and the Convention rose after a continued 
session of thirty-six hours. 

There remained the question of respite. It was 
debated upon the next day, Friday. It was with a 
singular difficulty that this second debate pro- 
ceeded. Men left their places time and again dur- 
ing the course of the day; there was such confusion 
that no vote could be taken; and all the Saturday 
the thing hung in the balance right on into the small 
hours— the dark and cold small hours of the Jan- 
uary night. It was three o'clock upon the Sunday 
morning before the final vote appeared. Six hun- 
dred and ninety men decided it, and a majority of 
seventy was found for immediate death. 

That Sunday, Louis, in the prison of the Temple, 
in the great square tower where he and his wife and 
his children and his sister had now for many months 
been held captive, suffered his passion. 

It is singular, instructive, a lesson in history, to 
note what the man's temper was during this pro- 
digious time. The curious may examine (dis- 
played under glass in the archives for all to see) 
the note which he wrote out with his own hand in 

217 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

his prison. It proves in its handwriting and in its 
composition, in its very erasures, a momentous 
cahn. If courage in the presence of death be a 
chief index to character, admire so complete a cour- 
age present in a man whose lack of judgment, 
torpor, grave lethargies, whose imbecilities even, 
had helped to bring him where he was. Louis, but 
for his death, might pass to history among the negli- 
gible figures of her roll ; but see how he died ! 

The note, written finely in even lines, asks for 
a delay of three days "to permit me to appear be- 
fore the presence of God." It asks further for the 
right to have his own confessor and for the guar- 
antying of that confessor (the Abbe Edge worth, of 
course) from all anxiety. He asks to see his 
family, and he recommends to the good-will of the 
nation all those who were attached to his person. 

Here and there he changes a word, scratching out 
the original expression deliberately, rewriting the 
substituted expression in a hand as firm as the rest. 
It is curious to note that he twice expunges the term 
"the National Convention." He was making his 
address to the Convention, and yet he would not 
use its title. 

218 





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THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI 

The night came early upon that Sunday, for the 
unbroken, drizzling sky still stretched above Paris, 
and there was no sunset. Moreover, the insuffi- 
cient windows of the medieval tower, sunk in their 
thick walls, were partly boarded to prevent com- 
munication with friends outside. After some 
hours had passed, — rather more than two hours in 
the light of the candles, — it was somewhat after 
eight o'clock and the time for the supreme ordeal, 
for his family were to be admitted. 

For some weeks now he had been separated from 
them. They had been in the rooms above. His 
demand for three days had been rejected. He was 
to die upon the morrow, but he was to be permitted 
to see his own before he died, and to discuss with* 
his confessor what he nobly called "the great busi- 
ness" of our passage from this life. 

There gave upon the stair facing the narrow 
stone staircase of the Temple a great oaken door, 
studded with many huge old nails. It opened, and 
the queen came in. God ! what must we not imag- 
ine her to have seemed in that moment, this woman 
who had so despised him, and yet had been faithful 
to him, and had principally ruined him; and who 

221 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

had, in these last months, so marvelously changed 
and grown in soul. The queen came in falter- 
ingly. She held by the hand her rickety little son ; 
her somewhat dull little daughter, the elder of the 
children, followed. The king's sister, the Princess 
Elizabeth, of a different and more simple bearing, 
and of a soul longer tried and longer purified, came 
in more erect, the last of the four. 

The king sat down and put his wife upon his left, 
his sister upon his right. He took the boy, the last 
heir of the Capetian monarchy, and stood him be- 
tween his knees, and told him in a clear manner and 
in a low and even tone the duties of a Christian in 
the difficult matter of revenge, that it must be fore- 
gone. He lifted up the boy's little right hand to 
give to this direction the sanctity of an oath. 

It seems that few words were spoken during that 
terrible time. The queen clung to him somewhat. 
He mastered himself well. Altogether these three 
and the two children were assembled for nearly two 
hours. A little before ten he himself determined 
this agony must end. 

Marie Antoinette, as was her custom under 
stress, broke out into passionate j)rotestation. 

222 



THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI 

Then she checked herself and admitted doom. But 
she implored him that they should see him again, 
and he said to her, perhaps unwisely, that he would 
see her before he left for his passing. He would 
see her in the morning. She would have it earlier 
still. He said it should be earlier by half an hour. 
She made him promise solemnly enough, and he 
promised her. Ten o'clock had struck, and the 
chimes were sounding over Paris and from the 
great clock of the Temple before she unloosed her 
hands. 

He stood, the women passed out with weak knees 
(it is said that the girl was half fainting) , the oaken 
door shut behind them, and the iron door outside it 
clanged to. He heard their soft steps, slow and 
creaking, mounting the winding stone stairs with- 
out, then they were lost, and he was in silence. He 
prayed a moment and then lay down to sleep. 
He slept deeply till five in the morning. The 
men bringing in the vessels for a mass awoke him. 
He rose and prayed. 

In the full darkness, before it was yet six o'clock, 
the queen heard a step approaching up the stairs. 
It could not be the king. She watched from above 

225 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

her candle. It was a messenger come for books of 
devotion which the king required at his mass and 
communion. Then she heard the chimes of seven, 
and the day was breaking; upon her window the 
falHng mist had made a blur, and it was very cold. 
She waited on until eight o'clock. There was no 
sound. Her agony was unrelieved. Yet another 
hour, and she heard steps and the coming and going 
of many men upon the stone stairs below. No one 
came up. The sounds sank away. The great door 
that gave into the courtyard was heard creaking 
upon its hinges, there was the pawing of horses 
upon the stones, and the cries of command to the 
escort, a certain confused noise from the crowd out- 
side the walls. The tower was empty. She had 
not seen the king. 

The king had passed through the prison door. 
He had gone on foot, with the priest by his side, 
across the little court to the high wall which sur- 
rounded the tower. The guards followed him. 

Just before he came to the barrier he turned back 
to look at the prison. He made a slight gesture as 
of constraint, and firmly turned again toward the 
gate. 

226 



THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI 

Outside this the guards were drawn up, and a 
roomy carriage of the sort that was then hired in 
the streets by the wealthy stood at the entrance. 
Two pohcemen armed with muskets were awaiting 
him at the carriage door. As Louis appeared, one 
of these men got in and took his seat with his back 
to the horses. Then the king entered, sitting in his 
proper place upon the right, facing him, and mo- 
tioned to the priest. Edge worth, to sit beside him. 
When they were both thus seated, the second police- 
man took his place opposite, and he and his col- 
league set their guns before them. The door was 
shut, the cab started at a foot's pace. 

As they came out on the broad streets (for they 
followed the boulevards), they could see upon each 
side of the way, three or four ranks deep, the sol- 
diery and militia which guarded those few miles 
through the town. There was no crowd behind 
them, or at least but few spectators, and a curious 
observer might have noted how few and rare wer6 
the uniforms, how many of the thousands alined 
were clothed in workman's dress or in the mere 
remnants of military coats. Even the windows of 
the uneven houses they passed (the boulevards were 

229 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

then but half built ) gaped empty, and no one stood 
at the doors. 

Before the carriage marched a great multitude 
of men, all enregimented in some sort of troop, and 
the gi'eater part of them drummers. These last 
drummed incessantly, so that this long and very 
slow procession was confused and deafened with a 
loud and ceaseless sound. Paris heard that sound 
rolling up afar from the eastward, crashing past its 
houses, lost again toward the west. 

It was close upon eleven o'clock when the car- 
riage came before the unfinished columns of the 
Madeleine and turned into the rue Royale. 

Louis was reading from a book the Psalms which 
his confessor had pointed out to him when he noticed 
that the carriage had stopped. He looked up, 
turned to the priest, and said in a low voice : 

"Unless I am mistaken, we are there." The 
priest did not answer. 

They had come to that wide open space which is 
now called the Place de la Concorde, and as he 
looked quietly through the windows, the doomed 
man perceived a great throng of people densely 
packed about a sort of square of cannon which sur- 

230 



THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI 

rounded the scaffold and guillotine. That fatal 
woodwork and the machine it bore stood near the 
entrance of the rue Royale and a little to the east. 
One of the executioners (who stood at the foot of 
the scaffold) took the handle of the carriage door 
to open it. Louis stopped him and, putting one 
hand on the priest's knee before he got out, said : 

"Sirs, I recommend you this gentleman here. 
See to it that after my death no insult shall be 
offered him." 

They said nothing in reply, but when the king 
would have continued, one of them cried : 

"Oh, yes, yes. We will see to it. Leave it to 
us." 

The king opened the door, and came out into the 
freshness of that damp air. Above, the sky was 
still quite gray and low, but the misty drizzle had 
ceased. They made as though to take off his coat 
and his collar. He moved them aside, and himself 
disembarrassed his neck. Then one came forward 
with a cord and took his hands. 

"What are you at?" he cried. 

"We must bind you," said the man. 

"Bind me!" answered the king. "I will never 

231 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

allow it ! Fulfil your orders, but you shall not bind 
me!" 

There was a struggle in which he turned to the 
priest as though for counsel or for aid, but they 
bound his hands behind him. 

The few steps up to the scaffold were very steep. 
The Abbe Edgeworth supported him so bound, and 
thought for a moment, as he felt the weight upon 
his arm, that the prisoner was losing courage. But 
even as he turned to glance furtively at the king, 
in that crisis Louis had strengthened himself, and 
stood upright upon the broad stage. With a few 
rapid and determined steps he took his way toward 
the guillotine, standing to the right of the instru- 
ment. Some yards in front of him and below a 
score of drummers were at the ready with sticks 
lifted, balanced as drummers balance them between 
the knuckles of the hand. He cried out, standing 
erect with his stout figure and heavy, impassive 
face, "I die innocent of all the — " at which moment 
there came a sudden cry of command, and the 
drums beat furiously. To that sound he died ; and 
those who were present relate that immediately 
afterward there arose from the great mob about, 

232 



THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI 

which had hitherto held its breath, a sort of loud 
moaning, not in anger or in hatred, but in astonish- 
ment of the spectacle and of things to come. 



235 



PART SIX 

LAFAYETTE AND THE FALL OF THE FRENCH 
MONARCHY 



INTRODUCTION 

After the palace had been stormed, it seemed as though 
Lafayette, who was in command of the principal army 
toward the frontier, might change all the destinies of 
France. It was a moment in which discipline had been 
very badly shaken, and he had the best trained troops to 
his hand. He was trusted by the wealthier classes in Paris, 
and though the queen and the royal family as a whole dis- 
liked him, it was known that he would not consent to the 
abolition of the monarchy. Undoubtedly if Lafayette had 
been either less scrupulous or a more energetic man, he 
would have intervened ; but that would have required a 
certain amount of preparation. He would have had to 
"feel" the opinion of his subordinates, and perhaps com- 
promise with the new Government. He did neither. He 
acted immediately, but too simply, refused to acknowledge 
the new Government, failed to resist it, and was superseded 
by it. Doubting his power to unite his command against 
the new state of affairs, he crossed the frontier and aban- 
doned the country. 



239 



PART SIX 

LAFAYETTE AND THE FALL OF THE FRENCH 
MONARCHY 

THE life of Lafayette has for his fellow coun- 
trymen and for most students of European 
history one supreme critical moment, which coin- 
cides with a supreme and critical moment in the 
story of our civilization. It was at that moment in 
the afternoon of Sunday, the nineteenth of August, 
1792, when he crossed the frontier and abandoned 
the defense of his own country. 

In the United States both the story and the 
legend of Lafayette have another origin. He 
came here as the leader of a rally of young French- 
men who were enthusiastic for an experiment in 
political freedom. He was immensely wealthy and 
the master of his own young life, for his father and 
mother were long dead ; there was nothing to tram- 
mel liis action, and though he was only a boy not 
yet of age, his figure acquired, as was right, a sim- 

241 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

pie and luminous quality in the eyes of those whom 
he had joined before they had successfully main- 
tained their independence. 

Lafayette came back to America long after, 
when time had added to this conception of him noth- 
ing that was not to his advantage. He was, in that 
second coming of his, surrounded by younger men, 
who felt for him all the reverence we humans feel 
for an older generation of heroes (he was nearer 
seventy than sixty years of age) ; he was known to 
have kept himself pure from the excesses of the 
French Revolution — excesses which were nowhere 
more detested than in America, and which had not 
yet been made explicable by the process of history. 
He came back to them, preserving the same ideal 
of liberty that he had discovered among them nearly 
fifty years before. 

It is no wonder that the view held of him in the 
foreign countrj^ he had served under arms should 
be what we know it to be. 

Nevertheless, if his career be considered as a 
whole, his interior temperament and character, as 
well as the external effect of these upon his con- 
temporaries, are best judged by that later conspic- 

242 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

uous ordeal through which he passed in the vigor of 
his manhood, when he decided neither to defend 
nor to coerce the French people, but to be rid of his 
native soil and the obligations of his birth. This 
ordeal showed Lafayette under the strongest light 
and in his fullest development. Whether he was 
wrong or right then, if wrong or right, why, are 
final answers to the problem of his place in his- 
tory. 

The moment when he deliberately abandoned the 
French army for exile he was within a few weeks 
of his thirty-fifth birthday, and the events which 
had led up to that final catastrophe had concerned 
the fullest and most active years of his career. We 
know him most largely and we can judge him most 
justly if we consider his work between the April 
when war first put its real novel and molding pres- 
sure upon the French Revolution and the August 
day in which he saw fit to surrender his command. 

Lafayette was a man just thirty years of age, 
in the enjoyment of a fame which, both in character 
and in extent, was unexampled, when economic ne- 
cessity, which is to gi*eat pohtical changes what the 
trigger is to the firing of a rifle, compelled the 

243 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

French crown to play the experiment of summon- 
ing the Assembly of the Notables. 

In that futile (and necessarily barren) council he 
sat of right, and he found there the atmosphere 
which was fated to embarrass his whole effort among 
the French, his people, when once they were 
aroused. He found in that assembly the enmity of 
many of his equals among the very small clique of 
wealthy nobles of which he was a natural part, the 
friendship of a few, the enthusiasm of none; he 
found himself possessed of over-exaggerated popu- 
larity with the plebeian public outside, which was 
attached to his name and his story, not to his char- 
acter ; and while he desired to erect a new state, he 
figured only as one of those who in that assembly 
proposed financial reforms irritating to the court 
and, to the appetite of the French for an ideal so- 
ciety, so much chaff. 

It would be a grave error in judgment to con- 
ceive of Lafayette then, or at any subsequent pe- 
riod of his life, even to his extreme old age, as a 
man lacking in that peculiar hunger for civic mo- 
rality which distinguishes the masters of national 
fate from the statesmen or the mere politician. 

M4i 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

He did enjoy, and throughout his hfe he be- 
trayed, a firm faith in a certain and definite po- 
litical ideal. It was a faith so clear that it was 
capable of expression in a creed, and so secure that 
he held it without modification from his earliest 
youth to his very death, and that through changes 
of fortune, and under the strain of a varjang en- 
viroimient more violent than any that oppressed his 
contemporaries. 

Unfortunately for him, his creed was a creed pe- 
culiarly unacceptable to the French people. It 
consisted largely of negative articles — the exact 
toleration of all religion that did not offend the 
current morality of his time, an attitude which he 
and many others mistook for a complete scheme 
of toleration ; it proposed an acceptation of popular 
sovereignty but a popular sovereignty which La- 
fayette, quite unlike the French, believed could be 
accurately expressed by a representative system. 
This creed acquiesced in a limitation of civic activity 
and responsibility to those citizens who happened 
to be possessed of property and no doctrine is more 
odious to Catholic Europe ; finally Lafayette's creed 
was summed up in a curiously passionate attach- 

245 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

ment to the letter of organic laws or, as men put 
that foible in English, "a respect for the Constitu- 
tion." 

This last article in the political faith of Lafayette 
was certainly that which most strongly possessed 
him, and that which he most tenaciously defended 
to the end. He had in his feeling for it something 
of religion; indeed, it was in part the absence of 
other religion from his character which must ac- 
count for so singular and so unnational an intel- 
lectual weakness. His passion for a constitution 
was as little based on reason, as unanswerable and 
as strong, as is the passion of any worshiper for the 
object of his worship. He did not postulate a con- 
stitution as something necessary to any state, — 
which it is, — nor did he accept it as one accepts any 
other inevitable mechanical condition of national 
life: he adored it. And he gave to his idol, as men 
always must to any idol, concrete form. 

He was enthusiastic for a particular and visible 
scheme of liberty: a representative assembly, an 
executive responsible to it, an independent judica- 
ture, and, to speak disrespectfully, the whole bundle 
of tricks. If the love of country interfered with 

246 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

such a scheme, or a burning zeal for equahty, or 
deep personal love for a military leader; if an al- 
most physical appetite for the ancient customs of 
the state rooted in the very heart of men interfered 
with it, if any of these human accidents were at 
issue with his idol, why, then, according to him, 
they must be broken at the idol's feet. 

It is this strange, and, to French eyes, grossly 
insufficient ideal of a "constitution," which explains 
all that was to follow. 

When the National Assembly met in May, 1789, 
Lafayette sat in that of the three houses which rep- 
resented the nobility. The mere presence of a par- 
liament or congress, with a crown in its neighbor- 
hood, was a beginning for his dream. To the 
rising flood of egahtarian feeling he gave no aid. 
He was not a prime mover in that prime current 
of the early Revolution which drew many members 
of the privileged orders — the nobles and the clergy 
— to sit frankly with the commons. But when that 
current was in full flood he did not resist it; when 
it had conquered, and when the privileged were 
merged in the general flood, he found himself a 
vice-president of the united assembly just before 

247 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

the fall of the Bastille. Of course he drew up a 
Declaration of Rights, which, equally of course, 
concerned taxation, redress before supply, and the 
rest of it, and was removed a thousand miles from 
the temper of that Gaul which had been at hard 
war for two thousand years, which had made the 
orthodox religion of the West, the Crusades, the 
Gothic, and was now about to make the epic of 
Napoleon. 

The capture of the Bastille was the chief incident 
in a group of three days that showed suddenly, as 
lightning shows things on a dark night, those na- 
tional characteristics which Lafayette so completely 
misunderstood that he could not serve them: the 
extreme rapidity of Gallic organization, its auto- 
matic and spontaneous growth from below, its high 
military aptitude, the twin growths of exaltation 
upon the one hand and ferocity upon the other, 
the effect of song and of blood upon the populace, 
the temper that made it impossible for the two 
massed divisions of foreign mercenaries to coerce 
Paris, the supreme importance of Paris itself when 
in those days Paris recaptured its secular leader- 
ship of the French people — all this was to Lafa- 

^48 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

yette no more than a violent and incomprehensible 
change of condition, the leveling of a platform, as 
it were, upon which the constitution was to rise. 

Rise it did, and on its rising he appeared in an- 
other and greater character than he had hitherto 
borne; for it was more under his direction than is 
commonly allowed that the New Regime took 
shape. It was he who framed the armed militia 
which was the physical basis of the whole construc- 
tion. He was the head and the designer of that 
great force in Paris, well armed, more or less 
trained, but remaining wholly civic and domestic in 
character, which took the name of the National 
Guard. 

A man might do worse than examine and fix 
finally for history the role of this force during the 
first two years in which the Revolution was per- 
mitted to develop its rapid progress within the fron- 
tiers of the French monarchy, without assault from 
the commercial oligarchy of England, the ancient 
privileges of the German states, the despotism of 
Prussia, or the heterogeneous, but enormous, might 
of Austria and the empire. In the opinion of the 
present writer the National Guard of Paris, with 

£49 




^HIGH\ LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

Lafayette, as its commander in chief, was not only 
an indispensable adjunct to the first phase of the 
French Revolution, but was, on the material side, 
the instrument of it. The voluntary quality of that 
force, its association with the political debates of 
the moment, its long agreement with the people and 
its lack of opportunity for display, its final collapse 
when the Revolution became a truly military and 
French thing and a crusade, have tended to obscure 
for posterity its true character up to the outbreak 
of the great war. 

Had the Revolution reached its term in the Con- 
stitution of 1791, and had war with Europe been 
avoided, the National Guard of Paris would easily 
be apparent as the chief factor in that achievement : 
and Lafayette made it. It was he who impressed 
it with its particular character, he who, in conso- 
nance with his theory of the state, made it a middle 
class, or, as we should say to-day, a capitalist organ- 
ization; he who forbade it to develop, as such 
French institutions normally develop, into a power- 
ful military instrument, and yet he who, with his 
considerable talent for command, made it strong 
enough to act as a powerful police and to be in his 

250 



V 




ARMAND GASTON, CARDINAL DE ROHAN 
After Rigaud, in Museum of Versailles 



THE; FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

hands a real weapon of authority that gave him a 
permanent and high direction in all that followed its 
enrolment and formation. 

It is true to say that Lafayette and his National 
Guard saved the monarchy in the days of October, 
1789, when Paris marched upon Versailles. It is 
still truer to say that throughout 1790 and early '91 
it and he were physically the masters of Paris. 

Had Lafayette loathed, as the king loathed, the 
religious quarrel in which the parliament of the 
Revolution engaged, had he with his armed force 
supported the crown in its resistance to the at- 
tempted schism with Rome, it is conceivable, or 
even probable, that the Revolution would have 
found a peaceable and perhaps not noble termina- 
tion. But to Lafayette the religious policy of the 
Assembly seemed the most natural of things. Of 
the enduring vigor of Catholicism he knew nothing. 
Catholicism was for him, as for most well-to-do and 
educated men of that time, a venerable supersti- 
tion, still pleasant to many women and to crowds 
of the rural poor, worthy, therefore, of a comfort- 
able decline and of decent burial, but quite inca- 
pable of provoking a civil war. That same violence 

253 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

of popular instinct which had made the St. Bar- 
tholomew in Paris and which was now about to 
make a furious assault upon the priesthood, was 
alien to him in either of its diverse and contradictory 
forms. Even in the end of his life, when contem- 
porary fashion gave Lafayette some idea of reli- 
gion, it was the gospel, not the church, of which he 
spoke; and in this early part of the Revolution he 
could neither conceive the strength of the old na- 
tional vision in its obscure remnant nor the corre- 
sponding strength of the exasperation which the re- 
sistance of the church to the revolutionary constitu- 
tion of the clergy would arouse. 

The first sign that Lafayette's constitutional 
ideal and the militia force which was the backing 
of it might fail was his inability to secure for the 
king a free passage from the Tuileries to the suburb 
of St.-Cloud on the Monday of holy week in 1791. 
The populace was already half in power, the Na- 
tional Guard and their leader no longer wholly mas- 
ters of the capital. The next much graver evidence 
of this change was in the flight of the royal family 
upon the night of the twentieth of June immedi- 
ately succeeding ; and in this the two elements fatal 

^54 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

to Lafayette's future in the Revolution appeared 
with equal clarity. On the one hand he had proved 
unable, with all his militia, to prevent the escape of 
the king; on the other hand, he thought it his duty 
— liis duty to the Constitution — to recapture the 
fugitives. The king's flight, despite Lafayette's 
presence at the head of the National Guard, despite 
his personal activity in ordering the force at the 
palace doors and seeing upon that very night to the 
position of the sentinels, made him suspect in the 
eyes of revolutionary Paris; his activity in recap- 
turing the king and queen made him odious to all 
that growing opinion in Europe and in France 
which had ceased to see in the Revolution a political 
experiment and had begun to see in it only a drama 
— a tragedy, the pitiful victims of which were Louis 
and the royal family. 

It is further characteristic of Lafayette's fate 
that all this activity of his counted for nothing. 
It was not he that effected the recapture of the fly- 
ing king ; that was done, as much had hitherto been 
done, by the energy of what was popular, plebeian, 
and, to him, incomprehensible, in France. But as 
much blame as a man could gather from the issue 

255 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

Lafayette most unfortunately reaped; and when 
the captives were brought back again after those 
torturing three days of heat, it was Lafayette who, 
as the general of the armed force in the capital, 
must ask Marie Antoinette to give him the keys of 
the palace. She threw them at him ; he caught them 
as a man catches a ball in a game. Of the many 
tilings he did in those days, one is sufficiently char- 
acteristic, and marks his attitude in all that rising 
anger. 

There was in Auvergne a family of squires called 
Romeuf ; they were neighbors of the powerful and 
wealthy Lafayettes, whose chief estate lay at Cha- 
vagniac, close by, and Lafayette had taken one of 
the young Romeufs to be his aide-de-camp when 
he was put at the head of the National Guard. As 
one might imagine of poor squires, the Romeufs 
were intensely and personally loyal to the king ; yet, 
whether through negligence or because his devotion 
to his constitutional ideal made him forget what 
personal affections might mean, or from a love of 
power, or from whatever cause, it was this young 
Romeuf whom Lafayette sent off post-haste along 
the eastern road to recapture the king and queen. 

256 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

From the moment of the royal family's flight and 
its enforced return to Paris, war with Em-ope was 
apparent, and the Revolution moved toward it as 
toward an approaching goal. The nearer that huge 
and novel tiling approached, the more did Lafa- 
yette's conception of a perfect state and Lafayette's 
militia weapon for its achievement shrivel and lose 
staff. The populace demanded the disenthrone- 
ment of a king who was certainly aUied with the 
foreigner. This threat of popular violence was 
militarily suppressed by Lafayette and his middle- 
class mihtia on the seventeenth of July, 1791, and 
the few dead who had been shot by Lafayette's 
guard became the symbols of an intense hatred be- 
tween the old decHning Constitutionalists and the 
new order that was to be established when once the 
cannons had begun. From that moment, despite 
all his ideals, he united with the privileged and the 
few in the eyes of his countrymen. 

A month later, at Pillnitz, the Emperor of Aus- 
tria and the King of Prussia met the French emi- 
grants to issue their threat of a coaHtion against 
the new democracy and of armed intervention in 
the affairs of France ; and when at last the accom- 

259 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

plished Constitution of 1791, bourgeois, satisfac- 
tory, a strict deduction from principles which 
nothing so vital as the French blood has ever ac- 
cepted, was compiled and sworn to, it seemed, in 
the presence of approaching exultation and war, 
like some merchant's villa carefully put in order in 
the suburbs of our great industrial towns — a villa 
just settled by some careful housewife, bound to a 
narrow life, but about to receive a company of sol- 
diers, of poets, of gods, and of demons, very ill 
suited to such furniture. Even to the men of its 
own time this new Constitution, the supposed fruit 
of the Revolution, seemed oddly colorless as it stood 
contrasted against that great dark cloud of history 
which was rising upon the sky. But to Lafayette 
it was a perfected ideal. 

Upon the last day of September, 1791, at four 
o'clock in the afternoon, the National Assembly 
dissolved, and the speaker of it read out these 
words ; 

"The National and Constituent Assembly de- 
clares that it has fulfilled its mission, and that its 
sessions are at an end." 

A week later Lafayette resigned his command at 

260 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

the head of the National Guard. Shortly after- 
ward the three armies upon the frontier were drawn 
up, and the real game, the struggle with armed and 
foreign conquerors, pledged to destroy the Revolu- 
tion, had begun. 

The total forces at the disposal of the French 
crown — and it must be remembered that the crown, 
not the parliament, was still master of the armies — 
were, along the whole frontier from the Alps to the 
sea, a trifle over 80,000 men. They were aiTanged 
in three armies. When war was declared in the 
following April, all three, the army of the north, 
that of the center, and that of the Rhine, were each 
under the command of a man who would certainly 
defend the monarchy against the revolutionary 
spirit which had its center in the populace of Paris. 

The smallest army, that of the center, a force of 
somewhat less than 20,000 men, was under the di- 
rect command of Lafayette, who was also the chief 
of the three commanders. Two thirds of the regi- 
mental officers had emigrated, certain of the cav- 
alry regiments had crossed the frontier in a body; 
even the artillery had suffered the loss of one third 
of its conmiissioned ranks in this fashion. The 

261 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

forces were not homogeneous, the numerous volun- 
teers among them were an element of weakness and 
disorder, the discipline was deplorable and daily 
weakening. It was a general opinion throughout 
Europe that the French line could not perform its 
task, and the first weak attempts of the army of 
the north to invade the enemy's territory in what is 
now Belgium, and was then the Austrian Nether- 
lands, resulted in a miserable rout and a disgraceful 
and murderous mutiny. The Prussian and the 
Austrian forces were slowly gathering for an inva- 
sion. That the crown, still in command of those 
ill-equipped regiments and guns, desired the suc- 
cess of the invasion was morally certain to the popu- 
lace of Paris; and the populace of Paris was right. 

The king was manifestly of a moral compact with 
the enemy, his chief city already holding him an- 
swerable for treason, when, in June, long before the 
invading army had reached the frontier, but when 
the terror of it was already rising high in the masses 
of the capital, Lafayette moved. His move was in 
favor of the king. 

His army was the smallest of the three, but the 
best provided ; what was more important in the tem- 

262 



^^ 




/J/ 

/'a/A'~ cliun? 
M /?/ lol 



CARTOON OF THE THREE ORDERS (THE CLERGY, NOBILITY, AND COMMONS) 
IN THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY PORGING THE NEW CONSTITUTION 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 
per of that moment, it was really attached to its 
chief; for though Lafayette was prepared to defend 
the king against Paris, yet the king had a tradi- 
tional value in the soldiers' eyes which Paris had not 
gained, and they knew that, in the midst of much 
intrigue the general's character had nothing in it 
at all of intrigue ; he was known and still approved 
by his soldiery. 

In reply to the growing menace of the populace 
in Paris the king dismissed his Mberal ministers. 
The parliament declared that they carried with 
them the regrets of the nation. 

It was on the thirteenth of June that this grave 
act was accomplished and that the final resistance 
of Louis and his wife to the Revolution was under- 
taken. This premature act on the part of the mon- 
archy, of itself a rupture with the popular forces 
of Paris, was suddenly given a new and much more 
violent complexion by the decision which Lafayette, 
at the head of his frontier army, awaiting the in- 
vader, took when he heard of it. 

It was on the thirteenth of June that the kins' 
so acted; the news of it reached the army on the 
fifteenth; on the sixteenth Lafayette wrote his fa- 

265 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

mous letter to the parliament, denouncing the 
Jacobin Club, which was, so to speak, the staff of 
the new popular movement against the foreign in- 
trigues of the crown. 

Parliament was seized of that letter and debated 
it on the eighteenth, and parliament, as constitu- 
tional in its mediocre and null professional medi- 
ocrity as the parliaments of a time of peace must 
always be, approved of Lafayette's intervention. 

Here let the reader pause to appreciate how de- 
cisive Lafayette's move was bound to be. Let him 
remember that the future, known to us, was un- 
known to the men of that time ; that their past alone 
was known to them. Let him recall how widely cir- 
culated — more circulated than the name of any 
other man at that moment — was the name of Lafa- 
yette; let him appreciate the reputation for integ- 
rity which he enjoyed with the mass of the nation, 
and the consequent trust which they therefore justly 
j)laced in his liberal principles; let him further see 
the foreign forces, a hundred thousand strong, 
marching, at last, against the French, and the nomi- 
nal head of the French state in league with them; 
finally let him not forget that a French army is to 

266 



Ns. 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

the French, as a Roman army was to the Romans, 
the most hving thing in the nation, the most vital 
of its organs, — it is an essential point, — and he will 
perceive what an enormous business must have 
arisen, and did arise, about this letter. It was vir- 
tually a pronunciamento. 

Lafayette talked of "his brave soldiers." A 
note of menace ran throughout the document, and 
it was this which kept the parliament, despite its 
sympathy with the constitutional policy and its 
dread of a popular rebellion, doubtful as to its vote. 
At first it decreed the printing of the letter and 
its distribution; then Guadet, eloquent and merci- 
less, changed that attitude by a speech. The As- 
sembly referred the letter to a committee, and 
Robespierre that night roused the Jacobins. 

This letter of Lafayette's fell at the very moment 
when the king, having dismissed his liberal minis- 
try, chose to oppose his formal veto to the two meas- 
ures wherein the parliament was most in sympathy 
with the populace — the decree against the non- 
juring clergy and the decree for forming a great 
camp of volunteers. The reply of Paris to both 
was the huge and peaceable, but very menacing, 

267 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

rising which is called "the Day of the twentieth of 
June." For hour after hour the radical masses 
poured through the king's palace; blood was not 
shed, and no actual insult was offered, but, to use a 
military metaphor, Paris had proved itself capable 
of mobilization in those hours, and armed conflict 
between it and the court seemed as near and as in- 
evitable as would armed conflict between two regu- 
lar forces mobilized and in contact upon the 
field. 

A courier to the frontier, leaving Paris upon the 
morning of the twenty-first, would normally reach 
the ultimate posts of the army late upon the twenty- 
second; but Lafayette at this moment, always an 
active and even officious commanding officer, was 
passing from post to post. The news of the insur- 
rection did not reach him in the camp outside Mau- 
beuge, where was for the moment his station, but 
at Bavay, an hour or two off to the west. 

Lafayette never acted with a Gallic fugue, 
though often with a reasonable promptitude. He 
did not, as legend will have it, take horse and make 
for Paris, booted and spurred. He communed 
with himself for some hours before arriving at any 

268 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

decision, and then took, with no particular rapidity, 
the road for Paris. 

He did not, as legend will again have it, dash into 
the Assembly, splashed and sweating, at the end of 
a hot ride ; on the contrary, he visited those authori- 
ties in the capital who were in sympathy with his 
views, and not until the twenty-eighth did he pre- 
sent himself at the bar of the Assembly ; the excite- 
ment was already a week old. 

When he did appear before the parhament thus 
in person, it was with singular effect. A majority, 
challenged by Guadet, refused to condemn him for 
leaving the army without permission; he again 
urged the parhament by voice and presence, as he 
had formerly urged it by letter, to suppress the 
popular societies and especially the democratic 
focus of the Jacobins. He was applauded as he 
walked past the members after his speech; and it 
seemed for a moment as though this dramatic, but 
not theatrical, intervention had achieved something. 

But it was the fate of that strict character to ef- 
fect nothing at all in all his long atid sterile life! 
A Frenclmian in touch with France, finding him- 
self, as Lafayette found himself, cheered by num- 

271 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

bers of his old National Guard when leaving the 
parliament, would have gone straight with the mob 
to the Jacobins and destroyed them, taking such 
consequences as might have followed. But Lafa- 
yette loved order, apparently for its own dull sake, 
and that day ended in nothing but a further ac- 
centuation of the breach between himself and the 
new Revolutionaiy group in Paris. 

Of that group the now rising name, soon to be 
the leading name, was that of Robespierre; and if 
you will turn to Robespierre's writing and speaking 
during those days you will find how accurately he 
judged the temper of his own people despite his 
Picard coldness. The crudest and the truest 
thing said against Lafayette in those days of fail- 
ure was Robespierre's phrase: "Lafayette, to 
succeed, must first win a victory over the enemy." 

Lafayette stayed the following day, the twenty- 
ninth of June, Friday, in Paris, discovered how bit- 
terly the old constitutional position had made him 
hated at court, and learned the truth of the phrase 
he had heard — the queen's phrase — "We will not 
be saved twice by M. de Lafayette." On Satur- 
day, the thirtieth, he took his way back to his army. 

272 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

Now, note that throughout all this that army was 
still closely bound to its general, and that Lafayette, 
upon his return to his camp, was still secure in the 
loyalty of his regiments. It was consonant with his 
character that, without caring in the least for the 
insults of the court, he still worked to secure the 
safety of the king and, therefore, of the Constitu- 
tion. He suggested the retirement of the court to 
Compiegne, "a town," he pathetically writes, 
"within the limits to which the Constitution allows 
the king to travel from the capital"; he promised 
to lend the authority of his name and the active aid 
of his old National Guard to the monarch if such 
an evasion were attempted. He was ready, in a 
word, to do all that a soldier could do for the sav- 
ing of Louis and for the crushing of the Paris radi- 
cals — just short of acting "in an unconstitutional 
manner." That he would never do! And mean- 
while Fate and Europe and the French people be- 
tween them were moving with no more care for the 
Constitution than right and anger and love ever 
have for a letter or a precedent. 

All that first fortnight of July was full of three 
great things in motion : the pomp of Austria going 

273 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

to the coronation of the Emperor at Frankfort be- 
fore the forces of Austria should be launched upon 
France ; the Federates from all the French depart- 
ments (and notably the armed battalion from 
Marseilles) coming up to Paris to take part in the 
great feast-day of the nation; the gathering of the 
Prussian forces upon the Rhine. Meanwhile two 
other things waited: Lafayette and his army 
waited to save the crown in Paris ; the court in Paris 
waited for the success of the invader and for its 
own deliverance. 

Upon Saturday, the fourteenth of July, the Fed- 
erates from all over France held their great national 
feast in the capital. On that same day the em- 
peror was crowned in Frankfort ; upon the follow- 
ing Tuesday (it was the anniversary of the Mas- 
sacre of the Champ-de-Mars!), with Paris in full 
effervescence from the arrival of the Federates, the 
Jacobins took their opportunity, Robespierre lead- 
ing them, and petitioned the parliament to impeach 
Lafayette for treason. The parliament tempo- 
rized. Upon the nineteenth, when the question was 
again raised, it refused to condemn the general. 
Old Diickner came from his frontier command to 

274 




MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

Paris; he was publicly accused in parliament of 
having conspired with Lafayette to march upon the 
capital in favor of the king. That charge was dis- 
proved so far as letters could disprove it; but in 
the midst of the excitement which it raised yet an- 
other step was taken by Destiny. 

The Army of the Allies being at last concen- 
trated at Coblenz, the Duke of Brunswick, its com- 
mander in chief, signed and issued upon the 
twenty-fifth of July the manifesto which had been 
largely dictated from the French court, and of 
which the most violent clause proceeded from the 
queen herself; it threatened the parliament and the 
town of Paris with military execution if the king 
were not restored to his pre-revolutionary power. 

That document was known in Paris upon the 
twenty-eighth, and for the next few days only the 
time and the conditions of the last conflict between 
the Royal Guards, their allied volunteers and mi- 
Htia upon the one hand, and the populace upon the 
other, were in doubt. 

The armed battalion of Federates from Mar- 
seilles had marched in upon the thirtieth of July. 
Upon the eighth of August one last attempt was 

m 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

made to get the parliament to impeach Lafayette, 
and for the last time the parliament, in its sympa- 
thy with the crown and against the Paris popu- 
lace, refused. The motion was rejected by 406 to 
224. 

Robespierre had never given a better example of 
his sharp and piercing judgment than when he had 
said at the Jacobins, "The parliament will not save 
the nation; the nation must save itself." 

All the night of the ninth of August Paris 
watched in a vigil ; the windows were full of lights, 
the hot dark was filled with the sound of bells and 
of the royal troops marching in to occupy their post 
of garrison in the Tuileries. A force of somewhat 
over six thousand, provisioned with a full comple- 
ment of ammunition, awaited the insurrection. 
This insurrection seemed at first delayed and im- 
perfect. By mid-morning the assault on the palace 
was begun by an ill-armed and unorganized mob. 
There was a moment when the garrison of the 
palace appeared to have succeeded. The populace 
returned in greater force and conquered. The 
monarchy was swept away, the royal family im- 
prisoned, and all the power of parliament passed at 

278 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH JNIONARCHY 

the same moment into the hands of its extreme and 
most democratic party. 

Such was the day known in history as the Tenth 
of August. The army of Brunswick was within a 
day's ride of the frontier. Lafayette, whose com- 
mand stood barring Brunswick's way, was instantly 
called upon by his own conscience to determine 
whether he should save the soil of his country or 
his constitutional king. 

It was a gendarme flying from Paris, and later 
an officer also flying from the capital, that brought 
him the news of the Tenth of August ; he so received 
it, probably late upon Sunday, the twelfth of Au- 
gust. He guessed that a provisional, and there- 
fore, to him, a usurping, government had been set 
up in the place of the old constitutional ministry. 
News came through slowly, but Lafayette learned 
certainly before JMonday that it was so. The old 
dismissed ministry had been "unconstitutionally" 
recalled by the parliament, acting, of course, under 
the pressure of the populace of Paris, and to these 
had been added most "unconstitutionally" certain 
ultra-revolutionary names, notably Danton's. 
This new government and its creature, the purged 

279 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

and diminished parliament, was sending out com- 
missioners, post-haste, who should bear its orders to 
the armies upon the frontiers, and obtain their al- 
legiance to the new and quasi-republican system 
which Paris and the Jacobins had established by 
hard fighting upon the Friday before. Upon Tues- 
day, August 14, the three commissioners, members 
of the parliament bearing such orders, arrived at 
Lafayette's headquarters in Sedan; but Lafayette 
had already made up his mind. 

When the three members of the parliament pre- 
sented their message to the municipality of Sedan, 
the mayor and corporation of that town, in agree- 
ment with Lafayette and perhaps under his orders, 
arrested them, and imprisoned them in the citadel 
of the place; Lafayette himself provided a guard. 

On Tuesday the whole army was mustered in the 
meadows which lie beyond the river before the town, 
the scene of the worst sufferings after the defeat 
of 1870, and an oath to obey the old Constitution 
was administered to them. 

Three corps refused the oath; one company of 
grenadiers, one of the new volunteer battalions, — 
that raised by the Department of the Allier, — and 

280 




GEORGES JACQUES DAXTON 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

most notably the gunners. They swore to obey 
"the representatives of the nation and no other." 
Certain, though not all, of these were put under 
arrest by Lafayette, and his act of rebellion against 
the new government was completed. 

The mass of his army was still intact, and would 
still have followed him had he then broken camp 
and marched on Paris. But here comes the final 
and most characteristic act of all: Lafaj^^ette did 
not march upon Paris. He "put himself at the 
disposition of the civil authority of the Depart- 
ment of the Ardennes"; he asked the neighboring 
departments in which troops of his command were 
stationed for their orders ; he refused to use military 
force save at the orders of authorized civilian gov- 
ernment; he preferred his political idea and creed 
to every practical necessity of the situation; or, as 
he would have put it, to every temptation the situ- 
ation might offer him. He did more: he allowed 
letters, pamphlets, and even emissaries from Paris 
to circulate freely among his men; he allowed one 
of the battalions in revolt against him, and even the 
commander of the guns in revolt against him, to 
write freely to the new government in Paris, swear- 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

ing their adhesion to it. He sent to department 
after department submitting the military to the 
civil power and awaiting their decision, when any 
other man would have marched straight upon the 
capital. Paris and the new order learned how its 
commissioners had been treated; new commission- 
ers were at once sent out; upon Sunday, the nine- 
teenth of August, the parliament impeached the 
general. But meanwhile he had decided upon his 
own fate. 

Lafayette upon that Sunday morning judged, 
first, that his army would now no longer follow him 
in an enterprise against its fellow-citizens; neM, 
that his conscience would not allow him to serve the 
new regime. 

Taking with him a handful of friends (a few 
who joined him against his will raised the total of 
the commissioned officers with him to twenty- 
three ) , he proceeded through the forest of Ardennes 
to the little town of Bouillon, then in French terri- 
tory, now in Belgic. He first left minute orders 
for the disposition of his army, notably for the 
safety of the outposts to prepare them against the 
shock of the immediate invasion ; he also left behind 

284 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

him all his official papers, sealed and in order for 
use of his successor whoever that might be. Before 
sunset he crossed the bridge in front of the famous 
little forest town, with its enormous castle and cru- 
sading legend, and rode out northward with his 
companions, twelve miles and more through the 
gathering darkness, toward Rochefort, all the way 
in foreign land. 

To that road he was compelled. Did he deviate 
to the left he would fall among the French outposts 
in the valley of the Meuse beyond the woods ; upon 
his right was the line of the Austrian advance. 

He did not even know whether Rochefort itself 
was occupied or not. He hoped it was not, for he 
intended to make his way up through the Nether- 
lands to England, and so to America. At the very 
gates of Rochefort a great fire burning warned him 
of an outpost, and he knew that the place was held. 
Nevertheless, he hoped against hope to pass 
through free. The commander of that post, a 
French noble who had gone over to the enemy, gave 
him so much liberty as to permit him to ride on 
with his companions toward Namur, or, rather, to 
send a messenger on before him to obtain the pass- 

285 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

ports. But Lafayette was already recognized and 
known. 

In Namur the Austrian commander, Motielle, 
was beside himself with joy on hearing the name. 
He shouted and repeated to himself aloud, "Lafa- 
yette! Lafayette!" as though he held in his power 
not the last sad exile from a soil too violently in 
love with freedom, but the most active of the new 
revolutionaries themselves; for the name of Lafa- 
yette, execrated by all the Nationalists for that of 
a traitor in league with the king, was also execrated 
throughout the privileged classes of Europe for 
that of a rebel who had destroyed the majesty of 
the French crown. Between these opposing camps 
he had no body of friends. It must ever be so with 
principle. It was to be so with Robespierre him- 
self at last. 

The governor of Namur held him and sold him, 
a valuable prey, and he passed into the prisons of 
the allies. 

The grounds which history possesses upon which 
to base its conception of Lafayette differ from 
those which suffice for most characters, and espe- 

286 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

cially for most military characters, because two tra- 
ditions concern him. 

Of these two traditions, the one which sprang in 
the United States of America concerns a young, 
enthusiastic man, so young as to be ahnost a boy, 
but reinforced by an independent position, a bril- 
hant fortune, and very solid talents, who volun- 
tarily led the rally of young Frenchmen in support 
of the new republic and who differed for the better 
in its eyes from most of his contemporaries in the 
point that he did sincerely and from the bottom of 
his soul admire those main principles upon which 
the Revolution in America proceeded. 

The other tradition is that of a man in the flower 
of his age concerned with a vast transformation of 
European society — a transformation springing di- 
rectly from the energy of his own people, and who 
so undervalued or misjudged it that, after appear- 
ing continually in places of capital importance and 
as continually failing to do more than preserve his 
principles, he ended by neither saving the institu- 
tions to which he was attached nor by so much as 
impeding their destruction. At last, equally con- 

287 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

demned by each section of contemporary opinion 
and power, he abandoned his high command upon 
the frontier in the first crisis of the great war be- 
tween the Revolution and the kings, and subse- 
quently appeared neither in the one camp nor in 
the other, neglected by both in common, a prisoner 
in the hands of foreigners. One picture is that of 
a hero; the other that of a pale figure bringing 
treason and certainly a prig. 

These two traditions are easily reconcilable if we 
draw for ourselves from the many sources available 
to us a true picture of the man. We shall then 
perceive why Marie Antoinette, with her ardent, 
but unsympathetic, temperament, was violently re- 
pelled by him, especially in his maturity; we shall 
understand how Carlyle, even with his grossly in- 
sufficient reading, was capable of drawing only the 
pale caricature which is among the worst failures of 
his great study ; and above all, we shall understand 
how, in what is for European history the crisis of 
his life, Lafayette neither led nor attacked the 
armed forces of his own people, but deliberately 
effaced himself ; and as a consequence of his action, 
though not of his own volition, suffered those years 

288 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

of effacement and prison. It is fortunately possi- 
ble to us, though it is not easy, to reconstruct the 
character which lay at the root of these varied ac- 
tions and especially of these singular inactions. 

Other great names of the French Revolution are 
obscured by the heat of the main struggle in 1793 
by the fact that they perished or fell into oblivion 
or betrayed their original convictions. The violent 
prejudices that attach to the passions of such mo- 
ments have made it difficult for the chief men of 
1789-95 to be rightly judged. For whether we 
seek the testimony of friends or of enemies, we are 
aware of conspicuous and worthless exaggeration. 
In the case of Lafayette we do not suffer from 
these causes of distortion. He was indeed most 
bitterly denounced, — in the crisis of his life when he 
abandoned his army there was hardly any to praise 
him, — but he was not present among the French in 
those moments of superhuman exaltation which fol- 
lowed upon the great war and therefore he escaped 
unbalanced praise and blame therein; on the other 
hand, he did not perish in that storm, as did count- 
less others, nor did he deserve or receive oblivion 
upon its close. On the contrary, he entered public 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

life again and played a great part in it. Added 
to such opportunities for being rightly judged, 
his own rigid adherence to his original principles 
has gained him the reward which always attaches 
to such fidelity — an untroubled place in history. 
From all these causes he can, if we take the trou- 
ble to watch him narrowly, be seen clearly by pos- 
terity. 

Let us then attempt a summary judgment of his 
character. The central axis upon which that char- 
acter turned may readily be perceived and defined, 
for it was at once so simple and fixed within so 
slight an accretion of secondary qualities that it is 
plainly visible through them. 

Lafayette was essentially of that type which has 
had for its philosophy, perhaps from the beginning 
of society, the scheme to which antiquity gave the 
title of stoic. He was immovable in the service of 
those truths which he perceived; but the truths 
which he perceived were few, obvious, and though 
of vast, yet not of the very last, importance. He 
conceived that an adhesion to such truths was suf- 
ficient for man and still more certainly sufficient 
for himself. 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

An absolute and unswerving demeanor, drawn 
from so strict an adherence to so limited a creed, 
lent him those qualities which are not more admira- 
ble, though they are more popular, when they are 
produced by convictions larger and more compre- 
hensive. Those are, first, courage of that rare and 
indomitable sort which meets with precisely the 
same rigidity physical danger, corporeal pain, pub- 
lic shame, the accidents of loss in affection or for- 
tune, the change of environing things, the default of 
human support even where it seemed most sure; 
secondly, a minute attention to duty where duty is 
commanded by the logical consequences of one's 
faith rather than suggested by the affections; 
thirdly, a generosity in action which proceeds not 
from charity or any warmth of temperament, but 
from an apprehension of what a creed demands, so 
that if the creed demand in certain circumstances 
such and such a sacrifice, the sacrifice, however 
great, is unhesitatingly and immediately made. 

To such adherence to fixed principle and in the 
consequences of that tenacity lay the core of Lafa- 
yette's nature ; beyond that core there was little else. 
We must add to it certain extraneous details not 

291 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

proceeding from it, but merely aggregated to it. 
He was vain after the fashion of vanity which is 
certainly not a vice and is almost a virtue, since 
it betrays a great carelessness of power and an in- 
difference to anything less noble than praise. 
Again — what has nothing to do with his vanity — he 
loved to find himself leading men, though he did 
not love the act of leadership. 

This last passion, the love of leadership, one 
might ascribe to an energetic activity in him were 
such activity discoverable in other relations of his 
life; but it is not so discoverable; for in conversa- 
tion, in the emission of ideas, in the criticism of 
others, in writing, planning, or doing, he was not 
conspicuously active, nor was he conspicuously ac- 
tive in the things of the body. He was not labori- 
ous ; he neither liked nor understood the expression 
of high energy ; nor, conversely, was he prone to be 
exhausted or to be tempted to lassitude in any form. 

Many men in a phase of their early youth betray 
this species of mind. It is the same cast of mind 
which often makes youth, in that early phase, un- 
compromising, constantly asserting truths appar- 
ently universal and patent, and ready to judge the 

292 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH I\10NARCHY 

enormous, and for it untried, complexities of human 
affairs. 

The long process of years usually disturbs that 
image : for good and for evil it is changed ; and men 
as they advance in experience tend at once to suffer 
what the poet has nobly called "the contagion of 
the world's slow stain." But at the same time they 
grow to admit into their faces a humorous charity 
and a confession of fellowship with the uncertain 
and erring human millions of which they are each 
only one tiny element. Repeated anxiety and the 
repeated example of the pains and dishonor that 
follow upon poverty make men as they grow older 
exaggerate the importance of wealth and they lose 
the just sense of proportion in mortal arrange- 
ments. Principle will be sacrificed to affection, 
especially if that affection be the constant and glow- 
ing affection for a family involved in one's own 
precarious fortune ; the manifold imbecility of men 
in their political action will weaken interest in, 
though it does not in the same degree destroy in- 
tellectual conviction of those prime political truths 
which make of sane and just men republicans. On 
the other hand, in a hundred little details which 

293 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

must count heavily in the fate of the soul, men so 
perturbed and declined from their early standing 
show comprehension, charity, a good individual 
judgment for practical affairs, and commonly, as 
life advances, develop virile and useful rules of ac- 
tion for themselves and for others. These rules are 
but subconscious in their origin, they are difficult 
to formularize; but they are wise and are proved 
wise by their fruits. 

Why did Lafayette fail to acquire this enlarge- 
ment — for it is an enlargement — of the mature 
mind, as he failed also to suffer those contamina- 
tions which commonly accompany it? 

Interior causes were present, to preserve him un- 
changed. There stood in his mind a barrier against 
expanding emotion. The native limitation which 
made him a stoic (and through which he has been 
less justly called a prig) would in all circumstances 
have restrained his development, keeping him from 
knowing men, but also preserving intact his high 
conviction and his conspicuous morals. I say a 
personal trait of this kind was present from the 
beginning, native to him, and necessarily present in 
his soul; but this interior preservative constraint 

294 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

was powerfully aided by two external circum- 
stances: first, he was immensely wealthy and had 
not in the whole of his life acquired one prolonged 
and educative experience of what the absence of 
wealth might effect in the character of man; sec- 
ondly, the strong and molding emotions which come 
to nearly all men successively came to him (as did 
the full control of his wealth) all at once and that 
in very early youth. He was married in his teens ; 
he was a father before he was twenty ; he was a mili- 
tary hero with a fame not national, but universal, 
before he was of age. 

In those same years he was flooded by surround- 
ing society with every article of his political creed, 
and it was stamped upon him in that plastic period 
of life by overwhelming success both of his own 
efforts in the service of that creed, and of that 
creed's general success in its first undertakings. 

The Declaration of Independence he had helped 
to make triumph ; once it had triumphed he had wit- 
nessed — from a distance it is true, and with some 
of the too hopeful illusions of distance — the pros- 
perous career of its principles upon its native soil. 
Such pressure, coming at such a moment in the de- 

295 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

velopment of a man, crystallizes him; and for fifty 
mortal years, from the achievement of American 
independence to his death in 1834, Lafayette re- 
mained Lafayette without growth or change. 

For pages so few as these a summary so short 
must suffice. The reader will expand for himself 
the consequences following upon this type of sin- 
cerity, conviction, and fixed, immutable inexperi- 
ence. In religion it was inevitable that such a mind 
should be dry. He professed, of course, a deism 
which some may claim in old age to have turned to 
conceptions a trifle warmer and more full of stuff, 
but I confess these tinges of color seem to me super- 
added from social fashions contemporary with his 
later years, when the Catholic Church, which in his 
youth nearly all the educated class in his country 
took to be a dying superstition, had reasserted its 
vitality. 

In politics such a man of course stood for those 
plain and fundamental principles which all clear 
thought has discovered to be the basis of just gov- 
ernment : that sovereignty must reside with the peo- 
ple; that the usurpation of that sovereignty, 
whether effected in the name of the people or in 

296 




MAKIE JEAN PAUL KOCH YVES GILBERT MOTIER, MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

contempt of them, must be equally resisted; that 
laws once fixed, having in them necessarily an ele- 
ment of conflicting detail, necessarily lead to dis- 
sensions, but must be obeyed by all indiff'erently 
until they are changed by the popular voice; that 
violence is permissible only against aggression from 
without or illegal action from within, and so forth. 

On the other hand, through an illusion common 
enough in men of this type, he confounded certain 
modern adjuncts of these ancient truths with the 
truths themselves. Thus he thought there was 
something sacred in representation and could 
hardly distinguish between the nation and an elec- 
toral body proceeding from it. He believed in the 
equality of man without seizing the fact that this, 
so far from being self evident, is a tremendous and 
mystical dogma allied with a particular type of 
religion and rising or perishing with it. He took 
for granted the necessity in any free state of leav- 
ing the courts of justice untrammeled by the execu- 
tive, but he neither devised nor thought there 
needed to be devised any scheme whereby the courts, 
thus untrammeled, should be kept pure. 

The defects in such a character superficial critics 

299 



HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 

ascribe to an excess of the intellectual faculties. It 
is truer to say that they are due not to an atrophy 
of these, but to a limitation of them. No man, for 
instance, worked in an atmosphere more purely in- 
tellectual than St. Thomas Aquinas, yet his most 
general judgments upon the principles of govern- 
ment stand as firm as Aristotle's, upon which they 
are based and which they complete. 

The excellences, again, of such a character as 
Lafayette's are by many imagined, and would cer- 
tainly have been by himself ascribed, to the domi- 
nating power of reason. If we look closely, it is 
not so. Between his strong convictions — and they 
were shared by countless thousands — whether in 
religion or in civic theory, between such theories, 
I say, and the expression of them in life lies the 
function of the will. The great glory of such char- 
acters as Lafayette's lies in this, that though their 
intellects may not have had the strength to grasp 
transcendental things or to perceive the complexity 
of the material with which a politician must deal, 
yet an unswerving determination to do what their 
rule tells them is discoverable throughout their lives. 
No greater thing can be said of any man ; and it is 

300 



THE FALL OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY 

not upon the moral side, but rather upon the rea- 
sonable, that such characters fail. Those who 
imagine the fate of the soul to depend upon right 
action within its lights will be secure of such men's 
salvation. 



THE END 



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